Leeds aims to cut costs with information lifecycle
management
The University of Leeds has spent £1.1m on an information
lifecycle management system to help it cope with an increasing
volume of data and enable it to take part in a grid computing
project with other universities.
Two Centera storage systems from EMC will help the university cope
with a 30% annual growth in the volume of data produced by its IT
systems. The technology, described as an information lifecycle
management system, runs on an existing storage area network.
Leeds will share much of the capacity of the disc-based systems
with the University of York and the University of Sheffield as part
of a joint research project.
Leeds used to migrate files to tape, but retrieval times were
considered to be too slow.
Steve Chidlow, ISS service manager at the University of Leeds,
said, "We are currently experiencing a 30% annual growth in data
and are expecting this to rise considerably with the expansion of
our grid initiative and other projects such as the digitisation of
our video library."
The university, helped by EMC and hardware supplier Dell, migrated
35,000 users onto the storage area network in just one week and has
begun to offer a managed storage service to all of its faculties
and departments. The aim is to help improve information management
across the entire institution.
Chidlow said the university will make operational savings by
centralising its student, employee, faculty and departmental
storage resources onto the tiered storage infrastructure.
Leeds University is also using EMC Legato Networker to back up its
data onto its Adic Scalar i2000 tape libraries, with the option of
archiving this information to Centera in the future.
The university is using EMC DiskXtender software to move and manage
information from its Windows 2000 and Unix systems to
Centera.
DiskXtender enables the file systems to be managed so that inactive
data can be moved to a tape-based archive, freeing up space on the
system.
The project began in August 2003 when the university implemented a
Dell/EMC Clariion CX600 storage system with McData switches in both
of its datacentres to manage its critical applications including
SAP, library information systems and Microsoft Exchange 2000.
