NEW! Salisbury University

Universities today find their students are demanding users when it comes to storage and other IT resources.

That makes it mandatory for universities to keep their information technology up to date, says Jerome Waldron, CIO of Salisbury University in Maryland.

Our admissions dean told me last fall, ‘The main question we’re getting on the road is, Where’s your wireless map?' I said, ‘Is that the main technology question, or the main question?' She said, ‘The main question. The first thing they want to know is, Where can we get connected?' "

Salisbury students probably don't worry as much about the SAN. That's Waldron's job. But whether they know it or not, all of the university's 7,000 students and 500 faculty have their email and other files on networked storage systems. Besides increasing uptime, reducing operating costs by consolidating servers, and making it easier to manage the infrastructure, Salisbuy's SAN lets Waldron give students enough personal storage to grow into over their tenure at the college.

The original purpose of the SAN was to host data from its PeopleSoft financial system in 2002, but the university has come to rely on it for all data retention.In some ways, the university is like your typical corporate entity in regards to storage. Waldron set up a tiered ILM system to handle data ranging from files accessed daily to email to records archived for compliance purposes. But in other ways, it is different. Many departments and schools within universities remain autonomous, and the requirements of user groups such as students, faculty, researchers, and finance vary widely.

“Our ILM is quite broad and quite long-lasting,” Waldron explains. “Most of our data can't go away, we're higher education. Research and intellectual property data goes on and on. We have different types of data coming from different sources. When you put students and faculty in the equation, there’s a different type of customer than you might find in commercial businesses. Then, you add what they're doing in research and instruction.”

Salisbury first implemented a SAN system from Dell in late 2002, before Dell began reselling EMC Clariion. According to Waldron, the system proved inadequate, so the university switched to Clariion the following year. Salisbury has since added EMC Celerra NAS systems to consolidate servers and Packeteer's PacketsShaper appliance for quality of service.

"We implemented the SAN to take care of storage issues from PeopleSoft," Waldron says. "Once we got that going, we added probably 30 servers and then we had a problem managing backups. Adding NAS helped reduce the overall number of servers on campus by about 25 percent."

Salisbury has about 20 Tbytes on networked storage, and that figure grows by about 2 Tbytes a year.MP3 files threatened to become another major resource hog until Waldron implemented Packeteer for its quality of service capabilities. Using QOS, Salisbury limited bandwidth for MP3 files.

"We decided we didn't want to eliminate MP3s, but slow them down," Waldron says. "We figured at some point there would be a legitimate academic use for MP3, and now there is. We use them for podcasts."

Unlike MP3s, Waldron doesn't try to limit the space email takes up. He says the SAN stores 30,000 to 40,000 emails a day. Salisbury gives students up to 1 Gbyte and faculty 2 Gbytes for email.

“We're quite liberal in our retention policy. [Ed. Note: of course they’re liberal, they’re a university]. In the corporate world, you can put a policy in effect and say there's a strict limit on email retention, but we don't do that."

Salisbury also placed more than one million images created by scanning records such as admission and financial aid applications and student transcripts onto the SAN, and the last major addition was data created by the college’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) department.Not all the data is treated equally.

"We've identified the data that needs to be available in a heartbeat -- such as PeopleSoft stuff. We use Fibre Channel storage for that," Waldron says. "We need to access that very quickly, especially during peak times like registration and this time of year, when students request transcripts. For archival files like imaging and GIS, we can wait a heartbeat-and-a-half, so we use SATA storage there. That is reasonably priced and can grow that at pretty rapid rate. We buy it a terabyte at a time.”

Putting all of that data on the SAN helps manage it. Waldron says there are four IT administrators managing 70 servers. "We have a very centralized server environment. I'll bet there aren't three servers on this campus outside of central IT."

There's one consolidation job left. Salisbury's IT department is working on bringing all of its applications into a portal that lets users sign on with a single log-on. "We want to put it all under one roof and go to a single log-on," Waldron says. "We're a Novell shop, but we built Active Directory on top of Novell. We set up Novell and other apps tied into Novell to talk to Microsoft. If you need access to all those apps now, you need different log-ons. That's obviously not very efficient. Ultimately, we will have a single sign-on portal. That's in development now."

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: