Doing More with Less at the University of Louisville

Maybe this sounds familiar: You have to implement all the new information technologies that each of your organization’s departments need, pronto, but budgets are tight and you can’t increase IT staff headcount or let the ongoing management of your existing infrastructure lapse.

We can hear you nodding your heads. So can Vincent Bellina, the enterprise capacity and planning manager at the University of Louisville. Vincent is responsible for forecasting storage needs and implementing appropriate solutions at the university located in Kentucky’s largest metropolitan area.

Almost every day, the IT department gets requests for new projects, he says. That’s not surprising when you consider that the university has three campuses, 12 colleges and schools, a research hospital, the National Crime Prevention Institute, a division of distance and continuing education, the state university library system, 6,000 employees and 22,000 students. The IT infrastructure hosts all business applications, including a core PeopleSoft system and a massive Oracle database, all student applications, and the university website. If that isn’t enough, the university is methodically migrating from its old client-server architecture to a peer-to-peer network because the previous environment became too expensive and unwieldy to manage.

Since Bellina and his colleagues possess neither superhuman capabilities nor the desire to work 28-hour days, something had to be done to automate tedious, time-consuming manual tasks related to managing and monitoring the university’s storage infrastructure.

Solution: Simple, Automated Storage Infrastructure Optimization

Bellina contacted DMD Data Systems for help selecting and implementing tools that would help him gain better understanding of the university’s storage environment and centralize its management. DMD specializes in information technology solutions that help customers create, transport, store and manage their critical information more effectively and efficiently.

A major component of the DMD solution is the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center Suite. It provides Bellina with a single platform for centrally monitoring and managing his entire storage infrastructure. With it, he can view and understand performance, capacity, utilization and availability metrics, and set and receive alerts for threshold levels on a wide range of parameters.

Additionally, DMD recommended virtualization solutions from VMware and the IBM TS7520 Virtualization Engine, which provides tape virtualization that speeds backups and consumes less energy than tape storage. These tools helped the university consolidate hundreds of servers and storage devices and use them as shared pools of resources to improve utilization and minimize the number of devices under management.

Results: Easier Management with Improved TCO and ROI

Simplified System Management: Before the University of Louisville implemented the DMD solution, much of the storage management had to be performed manually on each machine.

“We used to have a lot of manual processes,” Bellina says. “But that took too much time and used up way too many resources. It’s a lot of work to manage storage that way.”

With the IBM TPC Suite, Bellina can manage his storage infrastructure from a single console. He’s reduced the complexity of managing the university’s storage environments by centralizing, simplifying and automating tasks associated with storage systems, storage networks, replication services and capacity management. Bellina and his team are now able to rapidly perform formerly time-consuming tasks of device management, such as provisioning, discovery, configuration, reporting and event logging. Additionally, automated controls allow IT managers to set performance thresholds that trigger automated alarms. When the system exceeds a threshold IT personnel can make necessary adjustments on the fly.

Lower TCO and Higher ROI: By virtualizing storage resources, Bellina has minimized the number of devices under management, which cuts both operating and administrative costs. Furthermore, virtualization lets him extend the life of his existing disk systems by improving the utilization of his lower-cost disk, which helps him storage cost per gigabyte.

“For example,” he said, “on our last upgrade we needed about 4TB of storage. Because of the virtualization and consolidation, I only had to buy about $25,000 worth of midrange disk instead of $50,000 worth of high performance disk.”

Additionally, as part of a tiered storage infrastructure, older storage devices can be repurposed for secondary and tertiary storage, thus extending their useful life by up to three years, which dramatically improves return on investment.

Information Lifecycle Management: Another major goal of Bellina’s was the implementation of an information lifecycle management strategy, in which information is stored on media that corresponds to its business value.

When storage resources weren’t centrally managed, Bellina didn’t have a way to effectively move information from primary disk to lower cost resources when the information became outdated. Virtualization eliminates such problems because it allows IT managers to logically allocate virtual resources and make appropriate adjustments according to businessdemands.

Increased Worker Productivity: Manual tasks dominated storage management until the installation of the DMD solution. Whether it was provisioning, replication or reporting, the storage task required some kind of manual intervention, Bellina says. Now that those tasks are automated, he and his colleagues have more time to perform higher-value tasks.

“What used to take an hour only takes 10 to 15 minutes,” Bellina says. “This has given us remarkable time gains.” By minimizing the time it takes to manage the storage infrastructure, Bellina has been able to keep up with university requests for IT projects without having to add more IT staff.

Improved Backup Performance: Like most other organizations, the University of Louisville faces exponential information growth. And it has to perform backups with shrinking or static windows of time.

The TS7520 Virtualization Engine addresses these issues by reducing tape mechanical delays and providing fault tolerant architecture options that support high availability. As part of a tiered storage system, the TS7520 gives the university greater flexibility in developing its backup and recovery strategy. Its scalability also gives the university a way to incrementally improve its IT infrastructure over time.

Proactive SAN Management: Previously, Bellina and his team could only react to system problems. The inability to act before an unwanted event often resulted in data and application unavailability and lost productivity. The TPC Suite prevents troubles before they occur. It’s designed to predict failures and issue alerts before any impacts to the network take place. It also automates SAN device discovery and simplifies the analysis of multiple aspects of the storage environment, including capacity, utilization, and availability.

“If anything is modified, we see it. If anything changes in the SAN, we’re able to see it and adapt to it,” Bellina says. “It’s made us proactive versus reactive. It has helped eliminate problems.”

Conclusion

The pressure to do more with less is as common as dirt. But accomplishing is easier said than done. What it requires is a thoughtful approach to determining what tools can help you gain greater control over your resources by consolidating them, centralizing their management and automating many of the repetitive manual tasks required to maintain the system. By virtualizing its storage resources and by selecting a powerful suite of monitoring and management tools, the University of Louisville has taken a lot of guesswork out of maintaining the health of its storage infrastructure and protecting large amounts of information. Additionally, the solutions that the university implemented minimize the total cost of ownership and maximize the return on investment by reducing the overall cost per gigabyte of storage and by increasing the functional life of storage resources. As storage devices age, they can be repurposed to support the organization’s tiered storage and ILM strategy, which can extend their use up to three years.

DMD can simply solve your IT challenges too. Contact us for details at dmd@dmddatasystems.com.