The University of West Scotland (UWS) was formed in August 2007, following the merger of the University of Paisley and Bell College. This process involved a complete overhaul of IT, which saw the deployment of a new storage and content management solution from EMC.
The new university’s IT department saw the merger as an opportunity to cut costs, form a consistent technology skillset across the organisation, and turn its disparate silos of storage infrastructure into a unified service. “Following the merger, we could have just stitched each university’s storage components together, but instead we used the merger as an opportunity to transform our infrastructure and solve our ongoing storage problems,” said UWS’s ICT services director Brian Mullins.
Like many educational institutions, UWS faced the challenge of having to provide its students with large amounts of storage for a variety of media. The university has around 18,000 full- and part-time students. “Our population needed a solution that was capable of email archiving, storage of electronic media, and storage of video streams and lectures,” Mullins said. The university also wanted to improve data retention for graduates, and allow them to access documents for up to a year after they had finished their course.
“EMC storage seemed to fit the bill perfectly,” said Mullins. He explained how the university had considered EMC’s high-end Symmetrix product line, but found this too costly. Fortunately, the mid-range Clariion kit was scalable enough to meet the department’s requirements. “We went in with 30TB [of capacity] at the beginning, but it is scalable to hundreds,” Mullins said.
Early on in the merger, the university began a formal tender process for the purchase of both new servers and storage. The IT department came up with a short list of Dell, IBM, HP and EMC. Mullins said EMC was alone in focusing solely on the storage side of the bid, which made it the outsider for clinching the deal. However, its combination of quality, price and fitness for purpose swung the decision in its favour, he added.
The university was fortunate that EMC was at the time offering substantial discounts as a way of boosting its presence in the public sector.
To help with his final decision, Mullins sounded out other higher education establishments regarding their storage solutions, and found that many had good things to say about EMC. Mullins also had personal experience to draw on, having used Dell-badged EMC technology in a previous post.
Personnel from the university’s IT department also visited the different bidding vendors to see demonstrations. “We spent two days at EMC’s facility in Cork and were very impressed with what we saw,” Mullins said.
The department eventually decided on a three-tier storage solution, using a
mixture of hardware from both EMC and IBM, with management software provided by
EMC.
The first tier is designed to give immediate access to recent documents, while
the second tier allows for reasonably fast access to older material. “It’s as if
you are downloading from the web,” Mullins said. The final tier is used for
long-term document retention and archiving.
EMC Clariion SANs take care of the tier one storage requirements, while tier two’s near-line service is based on two EMC Centera repository systems, while backup and archiving is the job of a Scalar tape library from EMC partner Quantum. The university also chose EMC’s EmailXtender software to meet its email storage needs.
From IBM, the university acquired two BladeCenter chassis, each populated with seven server blades, six System x3650 workgroup servers and two System x3850 enterprise servers.
All this kit is located in a datacentre operated by South Lanarkshire council, which is next to the university’s Hamilton campus. Deployment took less than a week, according to Mullins.
“The network devices were put in first and once this was done, EMC delivered the kit in racks, and engineers connected all the cables,” he said.
The council-run datacentre provides shared services for a range of public bodies, and Mullins said using the facility should ensure higher levels of availability.
Disaster recovery was a key concern for the university, particularly after a power outage before the merger caused a temporary loss of access to all IT services. “The council invested heavily in the datacentre [to ensure resilience],” explained Mullins.
The new arrangement has bought other benefits. “We don’t need any physical presence in the datacentre,” Mullins said. As a result, staff who used to work with the servers are now able to focus on giving improved support to users. The university is also expecting to be able to reduce its manpower costs by about a quarter because of the move.
