HEAnet Website

HEAnet was established in 1984 by the seven Irish universities with the support of the Higher Education Authority to promote the electronic interchange of information within the third-level education sector.  The organisation provides high quality internet services to Irish Universities, Institutes of Technology and the research and educational community, including all Irish primary and secondary schools.  Hosting and streaming of digital content is an increasingly important part of HEAnet’s service provision.

HEAnet services rely on a highly developed and sophisticated IT infrastructure.  With increasing demand for storage capacity over the last decade, the organisation invested heavily in disparate storage systems which were becoming increasingly difficult to manage.  IT staff had to log in to multiple servers and use a variety of different software management tools in order to administer the systems.  Some of the storage pools could not scale easily and were not compatible with certain operating systems and servers.  The organisation was looking for a unified, high-performance and robust central storage repository for digital content that would eliminate inefficiencies and scale quickly to meet demand.  Of particular importance was the system’s ability to scale with HEAnet’s fibre network which at 10Gbps is the fastest and most advanced in the country. 

Following a detailed tender evaluation process, HEAnet selected Tyrell to implement a highly-available Isilon IQ Clustered storage system at HEAnet’s Data Centre in Blanchardstown.  Isilon IQ is a node-based storage system with no single point of failure and based on a modular architecture which simplifies deployment and expansion.  Once racked, the installed Isilon IQ cluster can be online in less than 10 minutes while an additional node can be added to the cluster in 60 seconds.  The cluster can survive the failure of an entire 12-drive node and still remain 100 per cent available. Crucially for HEAnet, the need to support multiple volumes and file systems is eliminated; since every Isilon cluster is a single pool of storage with a global namespace.  To add to the ease of management for the organisation, servers and clients across a broad array of operating systems can access the cluster without client-side software.  Unifying every system component in to a seamless whole is Isilon’s fifth-generation OneFS operating system which enables virtually unlimited growth – up to 2.3 Petabytes of storage. 

“HEAnet operate in a mission critical environment, where we simply cannot afford system downtime or loss of data access due to storage limitations,” said Justin Hourigan, Senior Network Engineer, HEAnet. We needed to introduce improved performance and economies of scale as well as a flexible storage platform that could grow with us in the future.  Isilon’s IQ is the only highly scalable storage solution we’ve seen that is completely capable of surviving system failures and has the required capacity and performance levels to support our business model.  For each node of storage we add, HEAnet not only get more storage capacity, we also get higher performance across the board.” 

The implementation took just four weeks from date of delivery, with Tyrell and Isilon engineers carrying out rigorous acceptance testing on site.  Test criteria specified by HEAnet were met and surpassed during this phase of the project.  “We really threw everything we could at the Isilon cluster, and were most impressed with the results” said Justin Hourigan. “Tyrell clearly understood our requirements and delivered the system to meet our very highly defined specifications. HEAnet has deployed 60 terabytes of storage which is performing beyond our expectation, with no downtime or performance issues.  This has been a very successful implementation for HEAnet, as it provides us with a core storage platform that will meet the diverse needs of our clients for a long time to come.”

A measure of HEAnet’s satisfaction with the Isilon system is that the IT department has recently moved its open-source software, Archive Mirror, to the cluster.  The system also hosts live and recorded internet streaming of Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann proceedings on the Irish Parliament website (www.oireachtas.ie).