Storage/Business Continuity
College aces the storage test
Thin provisioning and automated
tiered storage area network save Texas
school $2 million.
Students at the University of North Texas
work in one of its computer labs, an area
supported by the school’s new storage area
network.
State-of-the-art technology offerings,
including podcasts, on-demand services and
video lectures, offer a unique appeal to the
33,000 students at the University of North
Texas (UNT). While those efforts have helped
set UNT apart from other universities,
rapidly growing storage demands and an aging
existing storage area network (SAN) were
limiting IT efficiency and the performance
of applications that support students,
faculty and staff.
The aging 30-terabyte storage network did
not provide the visibility tools needed for
accurate capacity planning. "Simple changes
in the legacy systems took many times longer
to complete than they do on our updated
storage network and were in no way as
intuitive as they are in the current
interface," says Maurice Leatherbury,
associate vice president for computing and
chief technology officer, UNT. "Storage
purchases and upkeep were placing pressure
on the annual IT budget."
The IT staff at UNT knew it needed to
deploy a new SAN that could meet the
department’s performance, ease-of-management
and cost requirements. In the search for the
right solution, UNT went through an
extensive cost-of-ownership analysis of the
competing vendors, including two incumbents.
After UNT reviewed the data and worked
with its storage channel partner to evaluate
potential solutions, Compellent came out the
clear winner. The IT team selected the
Compellent Storage Center SAN and
implemented nearly 50 TB of virtualized
storage in two tiers.
"By working with my team to understand
our needs, Compellent and its channel
partner created an integrated solution that
directly addressed our performance and
management requirements," says Leatherbury.
Since the initial installation, UNT has
expanded its infrastructure to include three
additional SANs, increased capacity to 150
TB and reduced its data center footprint by
consolidating servers using VMware
virtualization technology. UNT’s upgraded
storage network now seamlessly supports the
majority of the university’s PeopleSoft
enterprise resource planning system, 14,000
desktop computers, distance-learning
applications for more than 28,000 off-site
students, three Microsoft Exchange e-mail
systems supporting 4,300 faculty and staff,
a new imaging system and two virtual server
farms.
Previously, UNT was unable to access
unused storage capacity because the drives
were pre-allocated for other applications.
With Compellent, UNT has gained the
visibility into its infrastructure to
cost-effectively meet growing storage
requirements. By eliminating allocated but
unused capacity, the solution’s thin
provisioning software, called Dynamic
Capacity, helps UNT maximize storage
utilization.
Dynamic Capacity enabled UNT’s IT team to
create virtual volumes of any size, yet only
consume actual physical capacity as data is
created. Ultimately, the ability to better
manage storage at a lower cost helps UNT
maintain its reputation for value.
"Before Compellent, managing storage was
a burden," says John Hooper, executive
director of administrative information
systems, UNT. "With Storage Center, my team
can quickly and easily manage our data."
UNT has plans to accelerate access to its
information by utilizing Compellent’s Data
Progression software. Data Progression
automatically classifies and migrates data
to the optimum tier of storage, placing
frequently accessed data on high-performance
storage, while infrequently accessed data is
moved to lower tiers.
By assigning a shelf life to its data,
UNT’s SAN automatically moves data between
high- and lower-cost drives on multiple
tiers of storage, based on rules established
by its administrators. With this virtualized
storage, optimizing how storage is used will
have an impact on UNT’s most-critical
applications.
"We can set up and provision storage just
by pointing and clicking," says Hooper. "The
interface enables a single administrator to
handle most tasks that require human
supervision, while automating some of the
more repetitive, time-consuming tasks that
keep us from other projects."
According to Leatherbury, the features of
Compellent Storage Center will save the
university more than $2 million over a
two-year time span compared to continuing to
upgrade the previous SANs employed.
UNT calculated initial hardware savings
of $1 million, plus $500,000 in operating
expenses annually for two years, and
performance benefits based on an analysis of
Compellent’s system, UNT’s previous SANs and
other competitive systems. UNT also
estimated it reduced the cost per TB from
$17,500 to $8,400 with the new SAN. Thin
provisioning allows UNT to only consume disk
space when data is written by the
application.
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