Educational SAN Solutions

University

Industry: Educational

 UNIVERSITY’s Science Lab is a research center that is playing a pivotal role in establishing a nationwide knowledge based information infrastructure by providing e-Science Research Support (a science collaboration system), the foundation for National Intelligent Meta DB services and National Grid Computing, Science Technology DB, Supercomputing, and Broadband Network Convergence Services.

CUSTOMER CHALLENGES

With the goal of establishing a one-stop access point for end users to easily access and download valuable information through UNIVERSITY’s homepage, UNIVERSITY rolled out a Next Generation Information Distribution System. It has integrated various types of information formerly residing within the homepages of approximately 140 disparate science technology institutes around the country. Today, it holds approximately 50 million records covering research analysis, scientific trends, references, patents, research reports, and HR information and the volume is continuously growing.

“The most critical component of the UNIVERSITY system was, without a doubt, storage,” says JooYoung Kim, a senior researcher within the UNIVERSITY IT department. “The entire project was designed around the idea of how to configure that storage.”

Prior to the Next Generation Information Distribution System project,  UNIVERSITY’s IT team, with the help of MITI Team, spent almost two years consolidating servers and a number of high-end network devices that were geographically distributed across many IDCs around the country including the primary site. However, as the organization began running more types of services simultaneously, 40 at last count, management became difficult and more complicated, and the risk of data exposure increased. This necessitated a need for a comprehensive disaster recovery system.

To manage data from over 130 distributed servers, University’s new Storage platform acts as a primary tier of consolidated storage, to deliver the best performance and availability. A VTL is used as a backup-to-disk solution to protect comprehensive data more effectively. For remote and local replication of the data stored in the Primary site, UNIVERSITY has implemented the solutions suggested by MITI.

“With a consolidated storage system achieved through a MITI solution we were able to implement a cost-effective data redundancy model in our environment,” says JooYoung Kim Today, UNIVERSITY is very satisfied with the level of improvement in service performance and data protection.

 “Before we implemented the MITI solutions into our SAN environment, resource allocation of server clusters and the complexity of management posed a lot of issues. Thanks to the MITI solution, resource allocation has become much more simplified.” JooYoung Kim, a senior researcher within the  UNIVERSITY IT department