Banner
Backup D.R. Replication Virtualisation Hardware/Media Privacy

Current Filter: Storage>>>>>Case study>

PREVIOUS

Filtered Articles:3 of 54   Current Article ID:5579

NEXT



Unlocking potential

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 05-2015    Views: 2598      





Hitachi Data Systems worked with partner XMA to provide a complete infrastructure solution that covers SAN, NAS and backup environments for Lancaster University. Together, they helped the highly rated research-led institution to face data demands that were predicted to increase from 300TB to 4PB within five years

Located on a beautiful campus in the North West of England, Lancaster University places great emphasis on a strong student experience and employability and gives students access to academics who are experts in their field. Lancaster is one of only a handful of universities with a collegiate system which has helped to forge a strong sense of identity and loyalty, and continues to be a distinctive feature of student life at Lancaster. Students from one hundred countries make up a thriving community based around nine colleges, creating a culturally diverse campus.

Lancaster's community extends far beyond the campus with research, teaching and student exchange partnerships with leading universities and institutions in 24 countries around the world. Now approaching its golden jubilee year Lancaster's journey has been a remarkable one, and it is now amongst the top one per cent of universities in the world, with an ambitious strategic plan.

The university required a robust, high-quality and scalable storage and backup solution to support its business applications and research data storage for at least the next five years.

The existing infrastructure was approaching full capacity and unable to continue supporting its growing data demands. The NAS environment (provided by EMC) was reaching maximum capacity and did not have a non-disruptive route for expansion of its research data storage. The existing EMC backup hardware had also reached end of life, and the backup window and tape quantity was at the practical capacity limit.

A key requirement for the university was ease of use for the IT team and the end users, more than 30,000 students and staff. With this number growing every year and presenting ongoing management challenges, Lancaster University required a solution that would accommodate a 25% year over year increase in storage capacity, concurrent connections, and total I/Os to support their virtual server infrastructure. With approximately 90% of the infrastructure virtualised, it was important that any new solution was able to support and be supported by Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere environments that were already in place. Another consideration was expertise in disaster recovery and backup as the solution needed to support failovers and provide resilience between two data centre locations.

Recent changes in government policy mean that the university is now mandated to retain research data for up to 10 years. Lancaster University needed a single vendor to manage its entire storage estate, including SAN, NAS and backup environments, with the ability to manage a predicted increase of research, personal and departmental data from about 300TB to 4PB over the next 3 to 4 years.

TWO PHASE MIGRATION
Hitachi Data Systems along with partner, XMA, utilised the National Server and Storage Agreement framework to provide a solution for Lancaster University that covered SAN, NAS and backup environments.

Migration was completed in two phases, and two separate NAS platforms were proposed for each main data type: user and research data. For research data, concurrent users, number of open files, and edits to files are retained for decades with a multiple petabyte capacity. User data is only retained for a few years and has a maximum capacity in the hundreds of terabytes.

For cost efficiency, Lancaster University's user data is now stored in Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) with intelligent tiering based on access frequency. To ensure scalability and reliability, research data is stored in a virtualised Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). HCP is ideal for the management of business-critical information and utilises Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS): HUS 150 via HUS VM. To provide a high-performance gateway and ensure fast file retrieval and additions, research data is presented via HNAS to users with Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) across the two data centre locations.



Page   1  2

Like this article? Click here to get the Newsletter and Magazine Free!

Email The Editor!         OR         Forward ArticleGo Top


PREVIOUS

                    


NEXT