New degrees of flexibility and robustness
27
1-2-1 DA
Pinnacles of learning, Oriel and Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford,
cleverly use thin-provisioning in a highly available storage environment and
achieve full disaster recovery between college campuses.
Oriel and Corpus Christi col- Linux and Windows Server “We were keen to consoli-
leges have been renowned running on mostly aging date existing services with a
centres of learning since the hardware. Network switch- solution that provided long
VE HAR
12th century and boasts ing equipment was also past term cost effectiveness
many famous former stu- its best in places and prone via a platform that was scal-
dents including Sir Walter to intermittent failure.” able, flexible and important-
T
Raleigh, but it’s the present ly could realise return on
day students, fellows and Dave continues: “Aging serv- investment.”
lecturers who demand the er equipment and increased
latest IT infrastructure to demands from applications Initially, Dave looked at a
facilitate a modern digital on hardware resources range of solutions to help
university status. meant an urgent replace- address the ‘problems’ he
ment program needed to be had identified. “As well as
Dave Hart is the IT Manager put in place. We needed to looking at both software and
tasked with delivering and implement a solution that hardware SANs, we also
managing this environment could provide increased investigated the purchase of
for both Colleges. Typical uptime and could fit neatly new servers each with their
requirements of the depart- into a robust disaster recov- own storage (i.e. a straight
ment include: file and print ery plan. swap, old for new) with a
serving, application serving view to non-virtualisation
(contact and accommodation Administration of servers, with consolidation of servic-
databases, booking & events applications and backups es on to fewer machines,”
systems, finance systems, took up a great deal of time, explains Dave.
webservers), quick access to largely due to the disparate
the Internet and University- nature of the server infra- “However, this was seen as
run email system for 600 structure and the services too inflexible and
people. run on them.” costly in terms of running
costs (power, cooling and
Dave Hart explains the rea- Dave summarises: “When I third party hardware
soning behind the decision joined Oriel I was fortunate support contracts). A hard-
to upgrade the colleges’ IT to head up a whole new IT ware SAN on the face of it
infrastructure: “The College team. As a priority we seemed simpler, but
has a 100MB link to the undertook an audit of the again proved expensive.
University backbone, neces- network and back office sys- Datacore’s SANMelody
sary for Internet connectivi- tem infrastructure. We iden- offered additional function-
ty. Pre Datacore/NCE the tified several key areas ality such as High
college back office infra- where hardware and backup Availability and NMV pools
structure consisted of fifteen resources were not up to that would felt we
physical boxes in four loca- the task, as well as some could take advantage of, at
tions around the site. major single points of a price lower than the hard-
These ran old versions of failure. ware SAN solution.”
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM FEB 09
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