Seizing New Opportunities Beyond Oil and Gas

DUG Technology modernizes legacy HPC storage with VAST‘s exascale all-flash solution, expanding its market opportunity and supporting customer needs

Industry Cloud, Energy
Use Case Seismic Processing, HPC Research
Video
DUG Technology Unlocking Speed, Scale, and Simplicity to Power HPCaaS with VAST Data

DUG Technologies selected VAST’s highly-performant, exabyte-scale all-flash based platform to get rid of HDDs in their data center and move beyond complex HPC file-storage technology, providing a leadership-class customer experience.

Overview

DUG Technology is a high-performance computing (HPC) leader, enabling customers to gain insights from large and complex data sets through innovative managed services solutions. Primarily focused since its founding on the oil and gas sector, DUG looked forward to a new growth phase that would enable the company to capitalize on opportunities in new markets including academia, astrophysics, medicine/genomics, wildlife modeling, and Covid-19 research.

Background

Building a resilient and adaptive storage environment.

Finally, while DUG’s applications were well-optimized for Lustre and HDD storage, the new applications that DUG was evolving to support all handled storage input/output (I/O) differently. Storage versatility and multi-tenancy became vitally important to DUG; any new solution would need to support a broad set of requirements and to support them at exascale. DUG also needed storage that could handle the multiplicity of throughput requirements for different applications. DUG looked to solid state drive (SSD)-based storage to provide higher performance and reliability. However, moving to SSDs on Lustre would have been prohibitively expensive, and affordability was paramount for DUG. In order to build a resilient and adaptive storage environment that enabled expansion into new markets, DUG required a new approach to storage.

  • Company Size

    300 Employees

  • Locations

    Australia, USA, UK, Malaysia

Outcome

Breaking into new verticals with the VAST Data Platform

DUG’s successful move into new markets, including academia, astrophysics, medicine and genomics, wildfire modeling, and Covid-19 research, was made possible by the VAST Data Platform. VAST delivered the capacity, performance, and reliability DUG needed to get rid of HDDs, move beyond complex HPC file-storage technology, and provide a leadership-class customer experience for customers within and beyond the oil and gas industry.

An all-flash storage offering provides the consistency and diversity of high performance that makes it possible for DUG to efficiently build out its multi-tenant cloud environment for its next wave of growth. The storage, reliability, and ease of management afforded by VAST Data has turned storage into a strategic asset for DUG and has enabled it to better achieve its broader business goals.

  • Advanced Customer Runtimes

    125×

  • Customer Data Availability

    99.9999%

  • Tailored Customer HPC Solutions

  • Best-in-class performance for all types of I/O needs

Our complete HPCaaS ecosystem is a combination of innovative software and hardware solutions. After using the same storage solution for years, we required a new approach — one that was highly performant, resilient and adaptive. VAST Data’s promise of ‘no compromises’ has provided faster I/O, consistent performance and supreme data integrity for our DUG McCloud customers. It is changing our relationship with data, driving novel ways to mine, process and visualize big data. This allows us and our clients to gain new knowledge and insight in much shorter time frames.

Stuart Midgley
CIO, DUG
The Future

Using Storage as a Strategic Asset

DUG chose the VAST Data Platform to expand its business and support the needs of a wide diversity of new markets and customers. The VAST Data Platform offering combines the speed and scale of a parallel file system with a new level of flash affordability and multi-tenancy to deliver a complete technological leap forward for DUG. VAST Data’s disaggregated shared everything (DASE) architecture also provides consistent performance by isolating non-optimized I/O so as not to impact other tenants. With the DASE approach, VAST Data eliminates the concurrency challenges of parallel storage to deliver high performance for specific workloads that does not come at the expense of other workloads.

Beyond significantly improving the customer performance experience, VAST Data provides a combination of reliability, management, and support that is not otherwise found with legacy HPC storage technologies. VAST Data’s DASE architecture supplies exascale scalability, enabling DUG to grow to tens of petabytes of flash storage with no single points of failure in an architecture that can quickly recover from failure. The reliability of the DASE architecture comes “for free”: it is a direct result of VAST Data’s data-protection efficiency and the architecture’s statelessness. Beyond resilience, the VAST Data Platform also simplifies the deployment and management experience for DUG by providing an integrated scale-out appliance that consistently pushes out new features that are automatically applied while the system is online, so there’s no downtime for DUG.

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