Melbourne University trials unified storage

The University of Melbourne has begun trialling a new unified storage platform in a bid to consolidate much of its existing archive and research requirements.

The university is one of the first Australian customers to take on the Hitachi Unified Storage Virtualised Module (HUS VM) from Hitachi Data Systems, ahead of its official launch last week.

Niels Madsen, team leader for the university's Information Technology Services division, said HUS VM was proving to be an "attractive" proposition during the evaluation phase.

“It simplifies transitioning our current virtualised environment while providing the additional benefits of now being able to virtualise any data type and maximise storage performance using Hitachi Dynamic Tiering,” Madsen said.

HUS VM allows clients to virtualise, manage and unify any data type (block, file and object) for storage on the same array and managed via a single piece of software.

University of Melbourne was a customer of Hitachi Data Systems prior to the trial, using a variety of the vendor's enterprise and modular technologies for archiving research workloads.

Hitachi Data Systems' ANZ chief technology officer Adrian De Luca said the university had been particularly interested in combining its enterprise and mid-range storage capabilities into a "single box" that could be applied to different types of workloads.

"[The University of Melbourne] leverages a lot of our enterprise technology for the purpose of providing a single way to replicate data across all their different applications," De Luca said.

"They are deploying new breeds of applications that they want to isolate from their existing environment."

De Luca claimed that the HUS VM was 40 percent cheaper than its nearest competitor, which he named as the EMC VMAX 10K.

He expected a strong uptake in Australia, "where we have a sophisticated clientele who want the enterprise capability but may not have the capacity to spend money on an enterprise storage array".

The University of Melbourne has not yet committed to rolling out the new platform more extensively.