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A major research laboratory in the United Kingdom has been conducting research on the environment and undertaking data analysis to monitor changes within it. Day after day, the research center amasses new data from sensors, satellites and researchers and processes sophisticated data models, to gain vitally important environmental intelligence. All this data needs to be backed up securely, so that it can be used to raise awareness of the impacts of humankind on the global environment and contribute towards its sustainable stewardship.

The laboratory selected the Dell EMC ECS object-based storage platform, to enable it to back up its data to disks on premise. All Dell EMC ECS solutions require compatible load balancers to distribute the inbound workload across the nodes in the ECS platform and maximize performance. With its exceptionally high data volumes, however, the research center needed a load balancer that could offer a particularly high throughput speed. “The load balancer initially proposed was not fit for purpose, because it had a licensing model that artificially limited the throughput,” recalls the center’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). “As a result, we would not have been able to complete all our backups quickly enough”.

• Strong experience in load balancing object-based storage solutions.
• Unlimited throughput, to support large data volumes.
• Reliable performance for daily backups of tens of terabytes of data.
• Effortless handling of exceptional peaks in data volumes.
• The capacity to load balance other business systems for no additional cost.

The research laboratory selected Loadbalancer.org as its load balancer vendor, because the company offered solutions that could deliver the speed it needed, at an affordable price. Critically, Loadbalancer.org does not limit throughput on its load balancers with restrictive license agreements and has specialist experience of load balancing in object-based storage platforms. “Straight away, Loadbalancer.org demonstrated that its solutions could work with Dell EMC ECS storage solutions,” says the center’s CIO. “It ticked all our commercial and technical boxes.”

To complement its existing virtualized IT infrastructure, the charity selected a virtualized load balancer, the Loadbalancer.org Enterprise VA MAX. “The Loadbalancer.org virtualized solution is very easy and straightforward to set up and manage,” the CIO says. “Within less than an hour of downloading the Loadbalancer.org software, we had a working load balancer installed with our Dell EMC ECS storage platform.”

Loadbalancer.org’s experience in load balancing object based storage platforms was invaluable for the laboratory. “The people at Loadbalancer.org gave us advice when we needed it, about our Dell EMC platform and our wider networking set-up, and they were spot on,” the center’s CIO says. “They definitely have strong expertise with Dell EMC storage systems, and we felt really supported by them, straight away.”

The research center’s Dell EMC ECS storage platform is up and running and, at times, needs to back up tens of terabytes of data changes overnight. By transferring the data from a number of Linux servers to ECS nodes in a fast and intelligent way, the Loadbalancer.org load balancer removes bottlenecks that might otherwise impede performance.

Furthermore, because Loadbalancer.org does not restrict throughput, the laboratory does not need to worry about unexpected peaks in the volume of data that it needs to back up. “We never know when spikes are going to come, but now we can be confident that we can complete our data backups overnight, whatever our data volumes, as the Loadbalancer.org solution scales up automatically,” the CIO says.

The research laboratory has signed up to a support agreement with Loadbalancer.org, but cannot comment on how effective or responsive this service is. Laughs the CIO, “We haven’t needed to put Loadbalancer.org’s support service to the test. Our load balancer has been reliable ever since we installed it!”