Education, Infrastructure, Procurement, Project Services, Virtualization
The Challenge:
Today our client is a post-secondary institution on the leading edge of long-distance learning, and serving more that 37,000 students from 87 countries worldwide. It was in the 1990s that they pioneered the use of computer applications to deliver course materials, but over time, they found themselves weighed down and competitively outpaced by legacy infrastructure and also faced a lack of IT standards. Their systems were running on multiple operating systems, various white-label servers with no manufacturer support and a storage environment of mixed technologies. All of this equipment was spread around campus and extremely difficult for their IT team to manage.
Additionally, these factors caused system availability issues for students, limited the faculty’s ability to utilize more modern distance learning methods and constrained the IT options for managing storage and implementing a disaster recovery strategy.
The Solution: Develop an Infrastructure Plan, Including a World Class Converged Storage Platform
Developing an I.T. infrastructure plan, establishing standards and a disaster recovery strategy for their IT environment was critical to getting back to the edge of distance learning. They phased out white-label devices in favour of standardizing their virtualization deployment on HPE ProLiant servers running VMware VSphere. In conjunction with PC Corp, our client to consolidated their fragmented, legacy storage environment into a single storage platform with one management console – HPE 3PAR StorServ storage with HPE 3PAR File Persona Software Suite.
A standout piece to their backup and archive solution is an LTO tape-based archive, the HPE T950 tape library. The HPE T950 was a new offering through HPE’s partnership with Spectra Logic. It has a minimum capacity of 500 tape slots and the capability to expand to 700 slots and a minimum of LTO-6 tape drives and media. It was the perfect fit for the client’s archive requirements and the first HPE T950 tape library deployed in the world!
With all storage consolidated on the 3PAR StoreServ platform in one location, the client is achieving efficiencies that help provide an exceptional learning experience for students. Management provisioning and maintenance can be handled via a single intuitive interface. This HPE Converged Storage solution has saved them $70,00 in annual maintenance fees, having significantly reduced their space costs, thanks to a 70% smaller footprint and lower power consumption.
