Sydney Uni completes storage virtualisation move

The University of Sydney has deployed a storage area network system that will provide its 49,000 students and staff with a virtualised storage environment.

The project, which took about six months to complete, involved relocating 200 physical servers, 451 virtual servers and hundreds of system applications such as finance, HR, administration and accounting.

Bruce Meikle, the university's CIO, described the data centre move as a "once-in-a-generation change" and said that with the new system, storage was centralised and could be allocated to projects or departments that required it.

"Incorporating virtualisation in our storage infrastructure is a significant step towards establishing a true shared services model. If a faculty requires more storage, we are able to efficiently and dynamically provision this storage," said Meikle.

Following a tender process, the university partnered with Artis Group and chose to go with IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) as the keystone of the storage virtualisation environment.

It used the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) as the backbone of its storage infrastructure.

"IBM's storage virtualisation solution gives us the flexibility in managing our growth and providing higher levels of services at a reduced cost," added Meikle.