The University of Huddersfield has embarked on a £1m
overhaul of its storage infrastructure from which it expects to
recoup its investment within three years.
The move involves consolidating the university's 170 servers onto a
single platform based on network-attached storage (Nas) and storage
area network technology from EMC. University officials said the
project, which will provide 8Tbytes of storage, would remove the
need for manual back-ups, significantly reducing administration
costs.
The university also expects to save money using information
lifecycle management (ILM) - a combination of processes and
technologies that help manage the flow of data through an
environment.
Alan Radley, infrastructure systems development manager at the
University of Huddersfield, said, "We can now move information onto
the most cost-effective storage platform as its value changes,
helping us towards ILM."
In the next few months, the University of Huddersfield will be
looking at migrating data from expensive fibre channel to less
expensive ATA disc, he added.
The university is taking a cautious approach to the roll-out, with
a number of pilot schemes taking place. The first of these, which
involves moving data from a staff server onto the Nas, was due to
start this week.
Later this month another Nas pilot will start at the university's
school of applied sciences, which will provide storage capacity for
academics and administrative staff. Radley said, "We will examine
the data to see what is out of date and where there are duplicate
files."
Another goal is to provide the university's 20,000 students with
personal storage space. Initially, students will receive 50Mbytes
of space each, although there is capacity within the storage
infrastructure for this to double.
Radley said, "We have felt for several years now that we need some
centralised storage for students so that they can go to any machine
on campus and retrieve their data, and also be secure in the
knowledge that it will be backed up."