University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota has standardized on EMC hardware, replacing Sun Microsystems kit, and laid the foundation for an ambitious new SAN. (See UM Picks Cisco SAN.)

The seeds of the overhaul were sown more than two years ago, prompted -- surprise, surprise -- by a data explosion. "The storage in our enterprise-class environments was growing by leaps and bounds," says Carl Follstad, the university's manager of data management services. "Vendors were putting out new versions of databases that were driving the database growth."

Even now, the university is handling around 300 Tybtes of data, and that's growing by around 10 percent a month. But back in 2004, the organization was hampered by its reliance on direct attached storage. "When it's direct attached, you can't share it. There was no replication, and disaster recovery was based on tapes," explains Follstad.

By performing SAN-based snapshots of data, however, Follstad has been able to cut backup times dramatically. On one application for students' course material, for example, he cut the time in half, to 14 hours. "It depends on the amount of data you're backing up [but] it's certainly faster. Previously, we would have had to back the application up to several servers, and back up each server concurrently."

The university uses a range of different software products to secure its new SAN-based data, including EMC's MirrorView and Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF), and Symantec's NetBackup, although the biggest change in the organization's storage infrastructure is in the hardware.Up until 2004, the IT department standardized on Sun, primarily StorEdge T3 and D1000 arrays. "It's not anything bad about Sun, but EMC was very aggressive on pricing," says Follstad. "There's not much Sun left within the central IT department," he adds, without divulging just how little remains.

Initially, Follstad and his team rolled out EMC Clariion boxes, followed by the vendor's DMX devices later in 2004. This, in turn laid the foundation for the new SAN, with Follstad scoping out likely candidates.

"The criteria was fairly simple -- it was who was EMC-qualified," explains the exec, which left Cisco, Brocade, and McData as the possible contenders. But the fact that Cisco already provided networking gear for the university tilted the scales in its favor. Cisco's decision to emulate EMC's sales pitch couldn't have hurt, either. "In terms of discounting off list, they were extremely aggressive," adds Follstad, although, again, he's tight-lipped on actual dollar amounts.

The first pieces of the SAN were deployed in 2004, when Follstad rolled out a pair of MDS 9216 switches at data centers on the university's East Bank and West Bank campuses. The decision to start building the SAN with switches rather than heavy-duty directors was a purely financial one. "We had a fixed amount of money to spend on our SAN, and, as you know, directors are much more costly."

By the fall of 2004, the decision was made to extend the SAN to some departmental buildings. "Instead of buying more switches to put in the hubs, we started buying directors and putting the switches out to the edge. By this time, the SAN was running pretty much bullet-proof, so it was easy to justify the investment in directors."Now the university is using a total of six MDS 9509 directors and 10 switches across three data centers and five other departmental buildings. Follstad has also set up a tiered storage system, with EMC's DMX as the primary tier for critical applications such as email, registration, and library systems. The second and third tiers are provided, respectively, by Fibre Channel and SATA-based Clariion devices.

Follstad is also looking at iSCSI in the future as a low-cost alternative to Fibre Channel for cash-strapped university departments. But the exec admits that the technology, which is championed by both Cisco and EMC, is no silver bullet. (See EMC Smartens Its NAS, China UnionPay Picks Cisco , and Cisco Completes Topspin Buy.) "There are certain applications where it makes a lot of sense for us, such as instrumentation for research," he explains. But for more critical applications Fibre Channel makes more sense, because Follstad can assign host-bus adapters (HBAs) to individuals. And the main reason many users deploy iSCSI at the moment, he notes, is because they lack HBAs within their infrastructures.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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