Sydney Uni deploys IBM virtualized infrastructure

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 02 September 2009 11:20

IT Industry - Deals

The University of Sydney has deployed IBM technology to consolidate disparate IT infrastructures which exist across the various university faculties, into a virtualized information infrastructure environment for 49,000 of its students and staff.

The university, which selected IBM premier business partner, Artis Group, to deploy the new infrastructure, says the IBM solution will enable simplification of storage management, increase flexibility and storage utilization, and reduce overall storage costs.

University of Sydney CIO, Bruce Meikle, said the data centre move was a once-in-a-generation change for the university which was faced with rapidly expanding data storage requirements, increasing IT infrastructure complexity and the need for faster and greater availability of data.

"Incorporating virtualization in our storage infrastructure is a significant step towards establishing a true shared services model. If a faculty requires more storage, we are able to efficiently and dynamically provision this storage. IBM's storage virtualization solution gives us the flexibility in managing our growth and providing higher levels of services at a reduced cost.”

Meikle said that through a competitive tender, Artis Group, and other vendors were requested to develop a solution that addressed a number of pressure points including the need to provision storage quickly and efficiently, the ability to scale rapidly, integrate with existing storage environments and deliver a tiered storage capability.

Artis Group managing director, Peter Giudes, said Artis worked with IBM to develop a cost-effective solution that met the university’s criteria on all points with IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) “as the keystone of the storage virtualization environment.”

Giudes said IBM's SVC was integral to the university's data centre move which included the relocation of more than 200 physical servers, 451 virtual servers, and over 30,000 components as well as 660 systems such as student administration, financial, HR and accounting.

According to Giudes, by using IBM Metro Mirror for data replication, the systems were relocated with only minor outage for the physical move itself. “IBM.s SVC allows multiple storage subsystems, from different vendors, to be managed as a single pool of resources, supporting higher utilisation of the University's assets and more effective use of the administrator's time.

“The deployment of SVC across disparate storage means that it can be managed as a single storage mass. SVC maximizes the use of every TB of storage and enables it to be provisioned expediently to the University’s faculties and business units irrespective of location, infrastructure or operating system.

“In addition to IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, the University also implemented an IBM System Storage DS8300 as a major component of their tiered storage infrastructure to maintain the flexibility of assigning the most cost effective storage systems based on user requirements. There is currently 300TB of storage under the SVC solution at Sydney University.”

IBM Australia executive, systems & storage group, Anna Wells, said IBM was dedicated to helping its clients improve their information infrastructure through “powerful virtualization technology,” and she said “the technology plays a key role in helping our clients build a new more dynamic infrastructure that helps to address the most essential imperatives to reduce costs, improve service and manage risks.”