Supporting Student Services 24/7 with Intelligent Infrastructure

Overview

Challenge

• Create an intelligent infrastructure to support all university departments and locations with 24/7 availability and comprehensive data protection.

Solution

• Harness Hitachi EverFlex to modernize, consolidate and simplify the storage environment, while switching to an OpEx model that reduces cost-per-terabyte.

Outcome

• Boost storage capacity by 25% and double performance without increasing total cost of ownership (TCO); enable full data protection with near-zero RTO and RPO.

Challenge

Founded in 1820, Indiana University (IU) is one of the world’s top public research universities, with more than 90,000 students and 21,000 faculty and staff across nine campuses throughout the state. The University has a long history of investing in state-of-the-art technology to ensure it can serve this large and diverse student body effectively. As a result, IU is regarded as a leader among its peers in the Big Ten Conference.

Mark Spencer, Director of Telecom Infrastructure at IU, explains, “In a higher-ed environment, departments typically run their own IT services. We’ve always tried to be more centralized and standardized, because it simplifies support, compliance and data projection, and it’s more cost-effective. And this is a trend that we now see other universities embracing, too.”

The University has built its own private cloud service, known internally as “intelligent infrastructure,” which offers enterprise and department service owners the ability to manage virtual machines and storage at a fraction of the cost of contracting with an external cloud service provider.

To provide the storage layer for this intelligent infrastructure, IU decided to refresh its existing storage hardware and increase capacity. This would enable it to consolidate storage systems located at its smaller campuses into its main data centers in Bloomington and Indianapolis, increasing standardization and reducing operational costs. At the same time, it would make it easier to secure and protect the university’s data, meet regulatory requirements such as HIPAA and FERPA, and ensure student services are always online and available.

“Business continuity is not something that you just do once in a while,” says Troy Williams, Chief Infrastructure Architect at IU. “You have to change your mindset and focus on it 24/7. It was something we wanted to build into our intelligent infrastructure at the architecture level.”

Solution

IU worked with its long-term partner Hitachi Vantara to design and deploy a solution for the storage layer of its intelligent infrastructure. This involved a significant upgrade of the university’s existing block storage systems, replacing two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5500 arrays with four VSP 5600 systems, and adding a new Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) File 34 environment to provide 3PB of file storage.  This new larger environment is perfectly sized to enable IU to consolidate files and data from many departments across all of its statewide campuses to its two main data centers in Bloomington and Indianapolis.

The new architecture uses Hitachi’s global-active device (GAD) technology for synchronous data replication between the two data centers. GAD provides a high level of data protection in the event of a major outage at one site; systems will fail over automatically to the second location, with near-zero downtime and no loss of data. “It’s one of the really neat things that we've been able to do here at Indiana,” says Mark Spencer. “We’ve implemented a business continuity solution that is really unrivaled in higher ed. That’s what I enjoy most about Hitachi; the technology just works. It's one of those things that I just don't need to worry about.”

While the new solution has increased capacity and performance, IU’s costs have remained stable thanks to the Hitachi EverFlex model, which ensures that the University has the flexibility to scale its storage to meet future needs without making large capital investments in hardware. “EverFlex has enabled us to do more, faster than we could ever have achieved with a traditional CapEx model,” says Troy Williams. “It enables us to pay for what we need today and build on that foundation as our capacity needs increase over time.”

Moreover, even though the new solution adds several new arrays to IU’s storage environment, it occupies less space in the data center than the hardware it replaces and requires less power and cooling. “The Bloomington data center is about 88,000 square feet – it’s like the large data centers you see in the movies,” says Mark Spencer. “But our Hitachi storage solution and our VMware environment is all packed into less than 800 square feet – and that’s 65% of our total server and storage infrastructure. It’s phenomenal that such a small footprint provides such a large proportion of our IT services.”

He adds, “We have an outstanding partnership with Hitachi. The team we work with is deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of what we do here at IU.”

Troy Williams agrees. “With technology, sooner or later you’re going to run into some sort of operational challenge. It’s how the vendor responds to those challenges that matters. That’s what keeps us coming back to Hitachi.”

Outcome

With the new storage layer in place, IU’s intelligent infrastructure has the performance, capacity and availability the university needs to ensure high-quality IT services to students and faculty 24/7.

The upgrade to the core block storage platform with the new VSP 5600 arrays has effectively doubled the maximum performance that the team can offer, as well as increasing overall capacity by 25%. Meanwhile, the introduction of VSP One File adds 3PB of central file storage, unlocking cost savings and improving maintainability by enabling IU to consolidate file systems from departments and statewide campuses.

Moreover, due to the versatility of the Hitachi EverFlex model, these improvements come at no extra cost to IU. “We have definitely reduced our overall costs in terms of hardware and the people we need to support it,” says Mark Spencer. “It’s been a really nice efficiency boost to the way we spend our IT dollars.”

Above all, the new storage architecture continues IU’s tradition of absolutely reliable IT service delivery, enabling the IT team to meet its near-zero recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) and maintain business continuity at all times.

“Even if we lose a whole data center, those services fail over to the other location, allowing for business to continue as usual,” says Mark Spencer. “The best part is that if that happens, our users won’t even notice.”

Troy Williams concludes, “Our storage infrastructure has to be rock-solid, and Hitachi has been instrumental in building that foundation with us, helping us get ever closer to our near-zero recovery point objective.”