CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Key Benefits • Researchers now have more reliable storage without breaking the budget • End users can carve out the required capacity on demand by themselves • Data is better protected from a central location by trained IT staff • The IP SAN provides performance and cost flexibility in supporting research needs
University of Michigan Gains Performance and Cost Flexibility through Intransa’s IP SAN Business Challenge As a research institution, the University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science and Arts generates mountains of data. Faculty and students work on projects in dozens of disciplines including Physics, Astronomy, History, Literature and the Arts. Since the University is a public institution, the IT staff must operate on a tight budget and support researchers’ storage needs with reliable but inexpensive storage. Solution The College deployed a low-cost IP SAN solution from Intransa giving the IT staff the ability to seamlessly provision storage resources to researchers on demand. Now, when a faculty member or graduate student receives a grant, they can simply log onto the network, carve out a slice of the storage fabric and reserve it for their needs. When the project is over, the IT staff archives the data on disk or CD and reprovisions the storage resources to another project.
The Problem The University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science and Arts (LS&A), is a leading academic and research institution in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More than 20,000 students, faculty and administrators from 70 departments collaborate on research projects that may range from a study of Cassini, a moon orbiting Saturn, to the eating habits of Great White sharks. The mountains of data generated by researchers are invaluable representing thousands of hours of careful analysis. Needless to say, this data needs to be managed accordingly and protected at all times. Unfortunately, reliable data protection is not always in the budget when you are working on a small grant. Researchers at the University would buy cheap off-the-shelf storage for their data needs and divert their meager budget to other more mission-critical research expenditures. As a result, data (and thousands of man-hours) would be lost when the cheap disk eventually broke down. Tim Rolston, Windows Systems Manager for the College of LS&A, finally decided that he didn’t want to hear any more stories from researchers about lost data. He started looking into inexpensive solutions that could provide reliable storage to students, faculty and administrators and could be managed and backed up centrally by him and his staff. He wanted to create a user-friendly storage pool that could be accessed and provisioned seamlessly across the college whenever resources were needed. And, as a public institution, he needed to do it on a budget.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY The Solution
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The College of LS&A already had an HP Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) to support administrative systems and some high-profile research projects. The SAN provided high performance, a reliable connection and almost five terabytes (TB) of storage capacity; however, the network was relatively expensive and could not be scaled easily to accommodate other projects when needed. It simply wouldn’t be cost-effective to expand capacity and let end users provision resources to fit their needs. Instead, Rolston looked to deploy a less expensive and less complex IP-SAN solution that could provide cheap capacity on demand. He investigated solutions from SANRAD and EqualLogic but could not justify the price point. He needed a solution that was reliable and provided enterprise-level performance but would not break his public institution budget. He finally settled on an IP SAN solution from Intransa. Rolston initially deployed an Intransa IP SAN storage controller and four disk enclosures. The Intransa systems’ architecture is designed to allow customers to purchase disks and controllers separately allowing IT staff to build the network up and out like building blocks. When the time comes to expand the storage pool, Rolston will be able to purchase additional enclosures and simply plug them into the controller with minimal configuration. Months later, the College of LS&A tested an additional controller for additional capacity. The network has since grown to nearly 25 TB of data. There is still lots of room for growth; Intransa IP storage can grow to a full 1,500TB of RAID protected, fault tolerant and high performance yet affordable storage. “The Intransa systems were the right tool for the job,” Rolston said. “They are reliable and provide the performance necessary to support our growing storage needs. We can scale accordingly and don’t have to worry about configuration. You simply add the storage and it is there.” Rolston also used the Intransa solution to support a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system that would allow him to archive data according to end user need, which is determined by predetermined policies. Tier one data is stored on the more expensive HP Fibre Channel network and backed up to disk, while tier two data is stored on the Intransa IP SAN and backed up onto cheaper media. This allows Rolston and his staff to protect data in a more costeffective method.
“The Intransa IP storage solution makes it easy to provision resources on demand. If a researcher needs more storage capacity, poof—it’s there.” – Tim Rolston, Windows Systems Manager, University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science and Arts
Business and IT Benefits Now, researchers in the College of LS&A are able to add storage capacity themselves when they need it. End users simply log onto the network, carve out the required capacity, name it and start using it. The process takes minutes where as it used to take days—or even weeks— for Rolston to provision storage resources from his Fibre Channel SAN. Researchers no longer think it is more efficient or cheaper to purchase off-the-shelf disk for their research needs. By using the resource from the Intransa IP SAN, their data is more reliable, better protected and doesn’t swallow a large portion of their research budget. “Intransa allows me to anticipate end user needs and address them much quicker than in the past,” Rolston said. “We no longer have faculty going out and buying cheap disk and trying to manage it themselves. Now I have a much better idea of the capacity we have out there, how it is being used and when we may need to scale up.” Backup and recovery is more reliable as well. The HSM system ensures that data is backed up properly and on a reliable medium. Data more than 90 days old is archived onto CD freeing up more capacity for other research projects. Backup is done every night for new, dynamic and mission-critical data, and less often for older, less important data. This incremental backup philosophy shrinks the backup window considerably saving on time and computing resources. Finally, the Intransa solution gives the school a more flexible storage network to better serve its end users. With a college as large and diverse as University of Michigan’s College of LS&A, research projects and their data needs vary widely in size and scope. A psychiatric study will have much different IT requirements than an analysis of Hubble Telescope images. Rolston is able to provide the support necessary for each project’s specific needs and stay within the public institution’s budget. It is merely a matter of finding the right tool for the job.
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