News

Harvard Medical School and EMC's Hulk

posted on 17 March 2008 07:29

Low cost storage for the research community

Harvard Medical School (HMS) is investigating the use of EMC's forthcoming Hulk hardware to provide low-cost storage for its research community.

Hulk has been publicised by EMC as being similar to, but much more than, clustered file system hardware. It is thought to be loosely similar to IBM's XIV technology and posited for cloud computing and Web 2.0 applications.

The HMS IT operating plan for 2008, introduced by John D. Halamka MD, has highlights which include:-

- "Enhanced support for the research community including the applications, infrastructure and processes needed to support CTSA
- "A focus on compliance requirements such as protocol submission, biosafety, and training
- "Implementation of the next generation of web-based tools to support the educational mission of HMS."

The section devoted to Production Operations is as follows:-

Production Operations

Leader: Steve Martino

Strategy: Provide 24 hour a day, 7 days a week operational and technical support for the networks and cabling infrastructure, servers, storage and backup services required by the entire HMS community. Telecommunications also manages and maintains voice mail, call management systems, and billing systems.

Goals for 2008:

Computer Operations:
- Continue to implement a multiyear disaster recovery plan by creating redundant network connections and new server/storage infrastructure in the Markley data center, resulting in Markley becoming the primary data center and Gordon Hall the backup data center.
- Implement the necessary hardware and software to enable a 100 MB Exchange mailbox size.
- Investigate the use of the EMC Hulk product to provide low cost storage to the research community."

----

There are several other sections in the document.

This is the first known customer evaluation of Hulk. HMS would be a prestigious win for EMC.