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Klara
Emergency Help
Industry · Academia & Research

ZFS storage and support for university research data

Klara helps research computing and campus IT teams run OpenZFS and FreeBSD storage for lab and instrument data, with ZFS engineers on call when a pool won’t import.

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Built for
  • Research computing
  • Campus IT
  • Labs running their own arrays
Microscope objective lenses over a slide lit in pink and blue in a research lab
Trusted by
  • Rutgers University
  • University of Virginia
  • UCSF
  • University of Washington
  • NBER
300TB

ZFS array with every member disk unrecognized after a reboot

1.5 hr

to recover the research data

Customer story

“When our systems administrators reached their experience limit, Klara’s team responded very quickly, recovering the research data in 1.5hr.”

Jason Pappas, Rutgers University · Higher Education · United States

What research teams bring us

Common research data storage problems

Research storage holds years of work, and it is usually run by a small IT team that looks after many other systems.

01

Data you can't regenerate

Years of experiments and instrument output often live on a single array. If the pool won’t import, there is no second copy to fall back on.

02

Large arrays, small teams

One or two admins look after hundreds of terabytes alongside everything else. When something unusual happens, in-house experience runs out fast.

03

Grant-funded budgets

Open-source storage avoids licence fees, but it needs real expertise behind it to stay reliable for the life of a grant.

By use case

ZFS and FreeBSD solutions for research computing

Disaster Recovery

Replicate research datasets to a second system or site with ZFS snapshots, and test the restore before you need it. It protects years of instrument and experiment data from hardware failure and ransomware.

Explore Disaster Recovery →

High-Performance / Large-Scale

ZFS storage for HPC clusters, scratch space and instrument pipelines that write large files fast. We tune pool layout and caching so storage keeps up with compute.

Explore High-Performance / Large-Scale →

Virtualization & VM Storage

Research VMs and shared lab services on ZFS-backed hypervisors. Snapshots let you roll a VM back in seconds before a risky change or upgrade.

Explore Virtualization & VM Storage →

Or go straight to a service

Services research teams use most

Support

ZFS Infrastructure Support

A monthly subscription that puts ZFS engineers on call for your team. Unusual issues get a fast, expert diagnosis, and your admins learn from every fix.

ZFS

ZFS Bug Investigation

Root cause for the unusual issues an in-house team can’t explain. You get a fix and a written explanation, so the same problem doesn’t come back.

ZFS

ZFS Storage Design

Plan the next array right the first time, sized for growth. Getting layout and redundancy right up front avoids a costly rebuild halfway through a research project.

Urgent

Emergency Help

Pool won’t import or disks unrecognized: get a ZFS engineer now. Fast recovery limits how much research data and time you lose.

Go deeper

ZFS resources for research storage teams

On-demand webinar

OpenZFS Data Protection – Best Practices for Keeping Your Data Safe

Article

Choosing the Right ZFS Pool Layout

Free course

ZFS Basecamp

FAQ

Research data storage questions

Yes, for most research workloads. OpenZFS checksums every block, so silent corruption is detected and repaired from redundancy, and snapshots let you roll a dataset back in seconds. It runs on standard server hardware, which suits grant-funded budgets.

Often, yes. Our engineers have recovered pools where every member disk went unrecognized after a reboot, including a 300TB research array at Rutgers University, recovered in 1.5 hours. If your data is at risk right now, use Emergency Help.

No. Many universities use ZFS Infrastructure Support, a monthly subscription that gives a small IT team direct access to ZFS engineers when something unusual happens.

Replicate ZFS snapshots to a second system, ideally at another site, and test a restore on a regular schedule. Klara can design the replication schedule and run a recovery drill with your team.

Get started

Talk to a ZFS engineer about your research storage

Tell us what you run and where it hurts. Our teams have a 72h response time, so someone will reach out shortly.

Production down right now?

Get Emergency Help