Delivering Secure, Always-On Digital Services for Students, Faculty and Researchers

Overview

Challenge

• With its existing storage approaching end of life and cyber threats on the rise, the University of Kent looked for a modern, resilient solution.

Solution

• Working with Trustmarque, the university has deployed a highly available storage architecture based on Hitachi and Veeam solutions.

Outcome

• The new solution enables the university to rapidly create and store multiple snapshot backups, accelerating disaster recovery processes by up to 80%.

Challenge

Founded in 1965, the University of Kent is a leading UK research university, welcoming more than 17,000 students to its campuses each year.

Daniel Knox, Assistant Director of IT (Infrastructure & Cyber Security) at the University of Kent, says: “IT cuts across everything we do — enabling everything from high-quality teaching for our students as well as world-leading research. In total, we deliver around 300 apps to support our students and faculty, in addition to IT infrastructure for research techniques such as genetic sequencing.”

For the university’s infrastructure team, ensuring the reliability and security of vital IT services are both top priorities. For more than 15 years, the University of Kent has relied on Hitachi Vantara solutions, delivered by its trusted partner Trustmarque, to provide robust, high-performance, scalable block storage for its key digital services. With the existing environment approaching end of life, the organization began the search for a fresh solution.

Darren Chapman, Infrastructure Development Manager at the University of Kent, says: “We aimed for more than just replacing old hardware; we wanted an active-active architecture to reduce cyber risk and ensure service continuity during disasters.”

Solution

The storage refresh project coincided with a wider digital transformation initiative, which had already seen the University of Kent construct three modern data centers at its main campus. In addition to deploying future-ready block storage arrays, the university aimed to provision the networking and storage infrastructure for synchronous data replication.

Chapman elaborates: “Before, we were unable to perform nightly backups of Windows File Server because of disk performance limitations. Restoring our production environment would also have been extremely time-consuming; we estimated it would take up to 12 weeks to rebuild everything from tape.”

Working closely with experts from Trustmarque, the University of Kent selected a new storage solution to help it achieve its long-term goals around data resilience, service continuity and environmental sustainability.

For production data, the university has deployed Hitachi VSP arrays in its primary and secondary sites, synchronously replicated using global-active device (GAD) technology and with a third array to act as a quorum disk. For added resilience, the organization uses Veeam Backup & Replication to create a copy of production data to Hitachi Content Platform with an additional copy stored on tape.

For user file storage, the university replaced its aging block storage with a brand-new Hitachi NAS (HNAS) Platform 5300 array at its primary data center, replicated to an identical storage array at the secondary site.

“Trustmarque and Hitachi helped us understand our options and find the right solution,” says Chapman. “The team also connected us with a UK university that had already implemented a very similar solution. That proved invaluable, particularly when configuring the HNAS arrays.”

Outcome

The University of Kent achieved a seamless transition to the new Hitachi solutions. Knox confirms: “We’d planned for at least a week of possible downtime for various end user groups, but we completed the switchover in a matter of hours.”

The new solution has already dramatically improved the university’s data resilience and cybersecurity posture. With 3.5PB of storage available, the organization has the headroom to create multiple immutable snapshot backups and save them to multiple backup destinations. Behind the scenes, dynamic carbon reduction technology from Hitachi helps minimize energy consumption and maximize storage utilization.

“We can back up user files on our HNAS arrays in a few hours each night — around 95% faster than before,” says Chapman. “We can now recover our production systems around 80% faster. And when we finish deploying the necessary compute at our secondary site, we’ll be able to restore instantly.”

With Trustmarque and Hitachi, the university has created a platform that will support students, faculty, and researchers for years to come.

“We’ve always been very impressed by the quality and responsiveness of Hitachi support; it’s always very easy to get in touch with experts when we need them,” concludes Knox. “Looking ahead, we’re excited to use VM2020 CyberVR to create digital twins of our systems — enabling even faster and more accurate testing before we roll out software updates.”