Liberty University standardises on EMC to manage growth, reduce costs

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that Liberty University, a Christian academic community in the tradition of evangelical institutions of higher education, has standardised on EMC information management software and storage to dramatically improve the performance and availability of its academic and administrative IT applications, while reducing the cost and effort of managing and protecting them.

Aaron Mathes, Liberty University`s Deputy CIO, said: "We`re a rapidly growing university with several initiatives under way, including the aggressive expansion of our distance learning programme to make our academic offerings more widely accessible.

"To achieve this vision, we`ve adopted an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy that can smoothly absorb change and expansion while ensuring consistently high availability of our online services. EMC`s suite of software and storage provides just that by allowing us to easily move our information from one tier of storage to another as it ages.

"With EMC, we`ve improved application performance by reducing the amount of unused data crowding the production systems, while substantially lowering the data volume and cycle times required for nightly backups. For our students, faculty, and administrative staff, information lifecycle management has meant faster and more reliable access to online services and a more rapid stream of new IT services. For our IT operations, we`ve gained administrative efficiencies that translate into real cost and time savings that we can pour back into development of new services and enhancing the infrastructure."

Data for all of Liberty`s applications, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 messaging and collaboration, Blackboard content management and collaboration, and SunGard Banner administration, finance and human resources, is managed in an EMC tiered storage environment. Liberty University uses EMC EmailXtender software to archive older e-mails from 40 000 Exchange mailboxes from the high-performance EMC CLARiiON fibre channel storage system to EMC Centera content-addressed storage.

Liberty also plans to use EMC DiskXtender software to archive infrequently accessed files onto Centera. In addition, the university uses EMC NetWorker software for the backing up and recovery of data to a lower-cost CLARiiON system using ATA disk drives as opposed to tape.

Seth Sites, Director of Network and System Operations at Liberty University, explained: "By archiving older Exchange data with EMC EmailXtender, we can reduce the amount of data requiring backup by almost 80%. When combined with disk backup, archiving has cut the backup time to just a quarter of what it used to take. By deploying this active archiving strategy, we save our users the time and effort of archiving their own e-mails, while allowing us to increase the size of their Exchange mailboxes so they are more productive and satisfied. It also allows us to reduce the amount of disk space required for backup by as much as one terabyte, so we can allocate the extra space for other applications and extend the value of that storage asset."

Jonathan Minter, Liberty`s Director of IT Development and Engineering, added: "The EMC solution also improves our recovery management capabilities significantly. Using EMC NetWorker, for example, we recently recovered a 40-gigabyte Exchange store from disk in just 17 minutes. If we had restored from tape, it would have taken between two and three hours - assuming we had the tapes onsite. That allows us to keep our students and faculty much more productive, and cuts our administrative time to just a fraction of what it used to be."

Based in Lynchburg, Virginia, Liberty University has chosen a number of other EMC software solutions to more efficiently and effectively manage and protect its EMC infrastructure. These include EMC SAN Copy, EMC MirrorView, VMware, EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender, EMC VisualSRM, EMC SnapView and EMC PowerPath.

Mathes noted: "EMC provides us with a total solution, including hardware and software that all work together, which simplifies the way we manage information over time. We believe that EMC is leading the way in ILM, and by embracing ILM, we are able to deliver outstanding services to our students and faculty, while saving money and reducing administrative effort."