The purpose of this procurement is to allow NORDUnet to purchase a flexible and scalable storage solution that will fulfil the storage needs for all NORDunet services for at least the next 5 years.
NORDUnet is a joint collaboration by the 5 Nordic National Research and Education Networks in Denmark (DeIC), Finland (CSC Funet), Iceland (RHnet), Norway (UNINETT) and Sweden (SUNET) and operates a world class Nordic and International network and e-Infrastructure service for the Nordic research and educational community. NORDUnet is an integrated part of the Nordic research and higher education community in the Nordic’s and do solely supply services to the research and higher education community.
NORDUnet operates a number of media services, used for hosting videos from conferences and for general educational usage. These services have recently had an enormous uptake, and the storage need is outgrowing NORDUnet’s current media storage platform. The NORDUnet data centres are located in the Copenhagen area.
The current media storage platform is homegrown, and instead of expanding that and eventually run into unsolvable scalability issues, NORDUnet has decided to procure a new storage platform, which can be expanded both in space and performance on demand as needed.
Common for the media services are that they provide fine grained access control to the content, so no videos are served directly from storage to the end consumer, but always goes through a web service.
The video files cover a wide range of sizes, as both length and resolution vary greatly from very short clips to feature length recordings of lectures or talks and from low resolution for portable devices to 4K.
Videos are in principle expected to be kept forever, but as everywhere else, older content is expected to be accessed less frequently. With the exception of some content being highly seasonal, like videos used in lectures, which are expected to be viewed in limited periods same time each year but will eventually be outdated and go cold.
A secondary objective is to consolidate storage islands for non-video services and supplement the storage in NORDUnet’s hyperconverged virtual machine infrastructure, where there is a need for large amounts of storage, at the expense of possibly losing some locality and IOPS.
The contract will include an initial purchase of a redundant storage system and at least 2 peta bytes of usable storage, including 5 years support.
There is option for additional upgrade of the storage capacity in steps of 1 or 2 peta bytes of usable storage.
The option can be executed one time per calendar year, with 3 months’ notice anytime within the initial contract period.