The University of California, Berkeley is renowned for cutting-edge research across a wide range of disciplines, from genomics and astronomy to social sciences and beyond. But groundbreaking research generates vast amounts of data – petabytes upon petabytes. Storing, accessing, and preserving that data is a critical challenge facing Berkeley’s research community.
In the past, Berkeley researchers relied on a patchwork of storage solutions to house their data:
- Campus-provided options like bDrive (Google Drive) and Box worked well for documents and small files, but had strict storage limits that made them impractical for large research datasets.
- Public cloud services offered virtually unlimited capacity, but recurring fees added up quickly, especially for frequently accessed “hot” data. Cheaper options like cold tiers in the cloud were more affordable for archiving but made retrieving the data slow and costly.
- Building on-premises storage infrastructure was an option, but required a solution that would be flexible and cost-effective to accommodate exponentially growing research data without breaking the bank. That’s where Cloudian came in.
Cloudian Offers Cost-Effective Scale
In 2024, Berkeley IT began offering researchers the option to purchase Cloudian data storage in increments of 125TB, for a one-time fee that covers five years of usage. This works out to just $48 per terabyte per year – significantly cheaper than public cloud storage options.
But low costs alone weren’t enough. Berkeley researchers needed fast, reliable access to petabytes of data. Cloudian’s scale-out architecture could grow seamlessly to thousands of nodes, all accessible through a single namespace and S3-compatible API.
By deploying Cloudian clusters in both its on-campus data center and the San Diego Supercomputing Center, Berkeley ensured researchers could access data quickly from anywhere.
Secure and Flexible For All Data Types
Just as important, Cloudian’s encryption, replication, and multi-tenancy features allowed Berkeley to use Cloudian for everything from highly sensitive data (classified up to Protection Level 4) to “active archive” storage that balanced cost with accessibility.
The flexibility to support any combination of use cases – hot, warm, cold, or archived data – in a single platform was a huge advantage.
Comparing the Storage Options
So how does Cloudian compare to Berkeley’s other storage options for research data? Let’s break it down:
- Compared to bDrive/Box: Cloudian offers effectively unlimited storage capacity at a lower cost per TB, with much better performance for large datasets.
- Compared to cloud storage: Cloudian has significantly lower total costs, no egress/retrieval fees, and higher performance when deployed on-prem. However, public cloud is suitable for hybrid / archival data with Glacier Deep Archive.
- Cloudian provides cloud-like scalability and flexibility with lower upfront costs, low overhead, and full redundancy.
- The 5-year purchase model makes budgeting more predictable.
More Data, More Savings
By offering Cloudian’s flexible storage platform, UC Berkeley empowers its researchers to manage growing data volumes more effectively. Researchers can spend less time and money on storage logistics and more on actual discovery. Now that’s a data storage success story!
Learn more at cloudian.com.
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