AUT tackles expanding data problems with new storage infrastructure solution

Cullum recalls: “We were facing a nightmare
scenario where it became almost a whole
industry around saving, keeping and
protecting that data. The storage backup
solution was ‘flaky’ and unreliable,
needing heavy user intervention. It was
very much ‘hit and miss’ as to whether
nightly backups could be completed.
The problems were centred on multiple
platforms, some with functionality that
was out of date, some costing a significant
amount in maintenance support,
some unreliable, and then there were
dierent technologies not talking to
each other.
“The risk was high because some equipment
would not be supported by vendors due to
its age. Matters were made worse because
the support from one major multinational
supplier was abysmal. The outcome for
us was a very manual process with far too
much technical involvement needed from
expensive technical resources.”
User dissatisfaction was growing as the
slow legacy backup architecture did not
allow for suicient disk retention. Cullum
says: “We had to resort to tape and a
frustratingly long time was taken to restore
deleted or corrupted user files. It was
stretching to hours, sometimes days,
to recover the data. Hardly an ideal situation
with every call meaning a problem or
something is broken and IT resources tied
up fixing stu just to keep things running.
That adds no value.”
Cullum recalls: “We had to get out of that
cycle. Our goal was a ‘set and forget’
environment. It gave us a reason to start
exploring the market. So in late 2013,
we issued an open tender for our top tier
of storage. Four vendors responded,
including Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”
Solution
More cost eective and technically
superior solution
“HPE was a new experience for us.
We’d never used them before. HPE products
were definitely more cost eective and
seemed technically superior. Our decision
was to give HPE. Our first engagement was
to deploy HPE StoreOnce 4900 backup
hardware. This immediately freed up our IT
team to tackle higher value tasks as well as
delivering a much better user experience.”
Cullum notes, as the relationship matured,
AUT spoke to HPE about other issues it
was experiencing in the storage space.
The existing primary high performance data
platform was struggling with the increasing
importance and reliance the university
was placing on Business Intelligence
(BI) and analytics. User complaints were
mounting about poor application and data
performance and having to sit through one
second latency delays. The cause was due
to the loads being placed on the existing
array for which it was not designed nor
could cope.
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“We were facing a nightmare scenario. It became almost a whole industry
around saving, keeping and protecting data. The storage backup
solution was ‘flaky’ and unreliable, needing heavy user intervention.
It was very much ‘hit and miss’ whether nightly backups could be
completed. The problems were centred on multiple platforms, some with
functionality that was out of date, some costing a significant amount in
maintenance support, and some just unreliable.”
— Roy Cullum, director, ICT Infrastructure Services
Case study
Auckland University
of Technology,
New Zealand
Industry
Education