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Enterprise Data Storage
Upgrade Project
Information is getting increasingly important in our daily
lives. We have become information dependent in the 21st
century; living in an on-command, on-demand world, which
means we can access information when and where it is
required. Everyday, students, staff and faculty members
access the web and database services at the university, send
and receive e-mails, share documents and videos, and use
scores of other applications. Their information needs to be
stored and shared in a central data repository (Data Centre
including the Data Storage).
Storage Area Network (SAN) is a network specifically designed
to connect the data storages to servers for use in day-to-day
activities. Almost all IT services at the university use SAN
resources to store and access their data. This makes SAN
resources critical to the IT infrastructure. Since all services
depend on the SAN, any performance degradation in the SAN
will affect all services that depend on it. In short, SAN and
data storage not only have to be up 24/7 but also maintained
to work at optimal performance at all times.
As the university grows and its services increase, so does the
burden on the SAN environment. Hence periodically, the SAN
infrastructure has to be upgraded or replaced to meet new
and future requirements. This is the goal of the Enterprise
Data Storage Upgrade project.
The aim of the project is to replace the existing distributed
data storages with a newer consolidated model, which can
sustain the university's data growth for at least the next 3
years in a centralized location that protects data, increases
speed, reduces the overall maintenance and operating costs
in terms of power, cooling and space requirements in the
Data Centre.
The new consolidated Data Storage is VNX7500 which is the
highest VNX model offered by EMC. With twice the cache
memory and the inclusion of Solid State Disks, read and write
access performance is much better than on the previous
models. On the capacity front, VNX7500 can house up to one thousand disks. Additionally, unlike the previous Data
Storages, VNX7500 is a unified storage, meaning it has a built-in NAS gateway, which will enable us to provide network
storage services like NFS and CIFS directly from the SAN - In addition to a wide range of new key features.
The SAN and Data Storage that are being deployed in UAEU FIT second floor data centre will act as the main site that hosts
all the university's IT data and services including MS Exchange, MS Sharepoint, Banner, blackboard, Web and portal services
in a unified and centralized location.
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