Tiered EMC storage strategy optimises cost, performance for diverse academic needs

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information management and storage, today announced that the University of Minnesota, one of the most comprehensive and prestigious public universities in the United States, has centralised information management using multiple tiers of EMC storage, software and services.

By providing customised storage "utility services" to its departments, the university has enabled students, researchers, faculty and administrators to gain faster, more reliable access to information they need for collaboration, with the freedom to focus more resources on education and research, rather than IT.

Carl Follstad, Manager of University Data Management Services, said: "Our previous storage environment consisted of a patchwork of servers and direct-attached storage scattered across the university. This made it difficult to share information and placed the burden of IT acquisition and management on individual departments. By consolidating our storage onto EMC and creating a centralised utility, we deliver and manage storage capacity for our departments much more cost-effectively than they could on their own."

"The great thing about consolidating onto EMC is that we can allocate storage to provide the most appropriate service level for each department`s needs, with the economies that come from centralised management. We`ve grown from 50 to nearly 300 terabytes in just one year, and we`ve expanded from two campus locations to eight, while managing it all with only three storage administrators. Rather than using their budgets and grants to hire storage managers, our departments should be able to support their education initiatives."

EMC Services employees first consolidated the university`s disparate storage onto EMC systems, and they designed and implemented a tiered storage infrastructure to support a comprehensive information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. EMC Services also provided training and knowledge transfer for the IT staff.

"Storage consolidation and ILM require highly specialised expertise," said Follstad. "That`s why we invited EMC Services to help us design and lay out the storage architecture so it was done right the first time. Then, we had EMC Services teach us best practices so we can manage the environment effectively day to day."

The university`s critical applications, such as campus-wide e-mail, centralised calendaring, PeopleSoft for student registration and Oracle applications are stored on high-performance EMC Symmetrix networked storage. Departments with important but less critical data such as academic health centre files and SQL Server databases for the economics department use EMC CLARiiON storage. Infrequently used information, such as library and laboratory images, reside on more cost-effective CLARiiON ATA storage.

For data protection, the university uses EMC SRDF and EMC MirrorView software to mirror data between two campus data centres in Minneapolis. With EMC software, which also includes EMC TimeFinder, EMC SnapView, EMC ControlCenter, EMC PowerPath and EMC Replication Manager, and VMware software, the university protects and manages storage in its diverse operating environments, such as mainframe, Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, Novell and Linux.

"Our role is to be a trusted adviser to our departmental customers," said Follstad. "Our users specify their performance and availability requirements, then we recommend the best storage tier and data protection strategy to meet their needs. The versatility of tiered EMC storage and software allows us to support a very diverse base of users. Some require service-level agreements. Others just need a place to store their files inexpensively."

In addition to storage capacity, the university`s IT organisation also provides file serving using EMC Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) gateways, as well as backup services using EMC CLARiiON ATA for backup to disk.

"Some departments want to outsource everything, so we`re set up to offer full service," said Follstad. "NAS provides efficient file sharing services with either high-end or mid-tier storage behind it. Also, by clustering our NAS gateways, we can serve two campuses in Minneapolis and one in St Paul, and have failover capabilities between them.

"We also back up to ATA disk rather than tape because it provides more reliability and flexibility," added Follstad. "And if we should ever need to restore data for a customer, we can do that in a matter of minutes, rather than the hours it would take with tape. Plus, because we`re a centralised service, I can run a lot more backup jobs at the same time than I could with tape. It`s all about simplifying IT for the departments and, ultimately, saving the university money."