KING SAUD UNIVERSITY
EMC solutions simplify storage management,
improve performance, and reduce costs
OVERVIEW
King Saud University (KSU) is the leading institute for higher education in the Middle
East and ranked by the Academic Ranking of World Universities among the top 300 in
the world. Operating a primary campus in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and with satellite
campuses located throughout the area, the university is also one of the largest
research centers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
ESSENTIALS
KSU's data has grown rapidly—from five terabytes five years ago to nearly a petabyte
currently. The KSU IT department was using ten separate and siloed storage systems.
Industry
This disparate storage, sourced from a variety of providers including IBM and HP,
Higher education
supported individual applications, but presented many challenges, including
Company Size
120,000 students; 5,000 staff
Business Challenges
•
10 disparate storage systems
resulted in issues with
management, high OPEX costs,
support, and cloud computing
•
Tape-based backup and recovery
systems caused lengthy backup
and recovery times
Solutions
management, OPEX costs, support, and the move to private cloud computing.
Lack of centralized management for the ten systems resulted in inefficient and
expensive administration. In addition, the many systems resulted in high OpEx costs.
Also, there was no failover for application-specific databases stored on a single
platform. And dealing with multiple suppliers was expensive and frustrating.
Finally, KSU was also moving toward private cloud computing, but the disparate
systems did not fully support its virtualized infrastructure.
The university wanted to consolidate its storage infrastructure with a single, unified
solution. KSU also wanted to replace its tape-based backup and recovery
infrastructure due to long backup and recovery times.
After considering a number of suppliers, including HP and Dell, KSU chose unified
storage and backup and recovery solutions from EMC.
•
EMC VNX unified storage
•
EMC FAST Suite
•
EMC PowerPath
•
EMC NetWorker
•
EMC Data Domain
Cache), this FLASH 1st strategy ensures that hot or active data is automatically stored
•
VMware vSphere
on Flash for optimal performance, while less active data is automatically tiered to high
•
VMware vStorage APIs for
Storage Awareness (VASA)
•
VMware vSphere Storage APIs for
Array Integration (VAAI)
•
Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft
SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server,
Oracle
SOLUTIONS
King Saud University deployed EMC® VNX® unified storage at its primary data center.
The highly scalable VNX has been configured with a mix of Flash and high density
drives. Combined with the EMC FAST™ Suite (which includes FAST VP and FAST
capacity drives for the lowest overall cost per gigabyte.
The university also chose EMC PowerPath® to automate data path management and
failover, while optimizing load balancing.
For backup and recovery, KSU chose EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage
systems and EMC NetWorker® unified backup and recovery.
SIMPLIFIED STORAGE AND VIRTUALIZATION MANAGEMENT
Working closely with EMC, KSU is migrating all data from its legacy storage systems
to VNX. When the migration is complete, VNX will store almost one petabyte of data.
CUSTOMER PROFILE
KSU utilizes EMC Unisphere®, included with VNX, for centralized management of the
Results
•
Simplified storage administration
entire storage infrastructure.
•
Improved performance by more
"We no longer have to phone our suppliers to conduct a reconfiguration," explains Dr.
than 48 percent in certain
Jalal Al-Muhtadi, Vice Dean of e-Transactions and Communication, KSU. "Instead, a
systems
single in-house storage administrator can now handle all of our management
•
Maximized storage utilization
•
Improved Exchange performance
significantly—email delivery time
has been reduced from up to two
minutes to only three seconds
•
•
Provided redundancy, ensuring
He continues, "We experienced big data growth due to the automation of our many
critical systems, such as eLearning. VNX is a simple, scalable solution that has helped
us to centralize our IT infrastructure and meet accelerating data growth."
VNX is fully integrated with VMware, the university's virtualization solution, which has
resulted in many efficiencies.
availability of critical applications
"We have already created more than 50 virtual machines and have virtualized a
and data
number of critical databases," Dr. Al-Muhtadi states. "Efficiencies will be further
Enabled elimination of tape-based
backup systems, reducing costs
further
•
requirements, which illustrates the management simplicity of VNX."
Enabled anticipated three-year
ROI due to lower OPEX and
management efficiency
increased when we introduce self-provisioning. Authorized users will be able to access
VMware to create and provision required VMs. This means that our staff will no longer
have to spend time providing this need to our internal customers."
King Saud University utilizes the VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness
(VASA) to optimize vSphere™ thin provisioning. It also uses VMware vSphere
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to continuously monitor utilization across
vSphere servers and intelligently allocate available resources among virtual machines
according to business needs.
In addition, VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) provides more
Hypervisor compute power for running VMs.
“We experienced big data growth due to the automation of our
many critical systems, such as eLearning. VNX is a simple,
scalable solution that has helped us to centralize our IT
infrastructure and meet accelerating data growth.″
Dr. Jalal Al-Muhtadi
Vice Dean of e-Transactions and Communication at King Saud University
REDUCING COSTS
As a result of the consolidation and simplification of the environment, KSU has seen a
reduction in both acquisition and ongoing costs.
"The VNX unified storage environment has also significantly reduced costs. Legacy
platforms have been retired, minimizing OpEx, including cooling, power, maintenance,
storage space, and licensing," says Dr. Al-Muhtadi.
VNX and FLASH 1st also help to maximize storage utilization, further reducing costs.
"Prior to unifying our storage environment, some of our platforms only had 20
percent storage utilization. With VNX and FLASH 1st, we effectively utilize the right tier
of storage for the data's activity level," he continues.
With VNX's simplified management interface, high storage utilization, and scalability
to handle future data growth, the IT department anticipates that VNX will pay for
itself in only three years.
SPEEDING PERFORMANCE, ENSURING AVAILABILITY
In addition to providing improvements in management and costs, the EMC solutions
have enabled the university to speed performance and ensure availability.
Dr. Al-Muhtadi says that with VNX, performance has increased dramatically: "As an
example, when Microsoft Exchange was running on our previous storage systems,
there was an IOPS bottleneck that reduced performance. But with VNX, Exchange
performance is significantly improved—email delivery time has been reduced from up
to two minutes to only three seconds."
And because applications and data now share a unified, high performance
environment, KSU no longer experiences the inherent risks and costs associated with
siloed storage platforms.
"Historically, a number of our mission-critical applications were supported directattached storage. In the event of a failure, those applications would be unavailable,
interrupting student and staff activities," explains Mr. Abdulla Alawwad, Data Center
Manager, Deanship of e-Transactions and Communication, King Saud University.
"With VNX, all of our critical applications enjoy a unified environment characterized by
high performance and redundancy that significantly reduces the risk of outages."
RELIABLE, COST-EFFECTIVE BACKUP AND RECOVERY
KSU will soon deploy Data Domain and NetWorker and eliminate tape from its
environment.
"Soon, we will completely eliminate tape and will enjoy the efficiencies of disk-to-disk
backup. We chose Data Domain due to its deduplication capabilities, which will help
us protect our large volume of data," states Dr. Esam Alwagait, Dean of eTransactions and Communication at King Saud University.
When fully deployed, EMC Data Domain will enable the university to significantly
reduce backup windows, while shortening recovery times from days to minutes.
"We are implementing a full DR capability and will soon establish a secondary data
center," adds Dr. Alwagait. "Data Domain is central to our DR strategy."
CONTACT US
To learn more about how EMC
products, services, and solutions can
help solve your business and IT
challenges, contact your local
representative or authorized reseller—
or visit us at www.EMC.com.
EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Data Domain, FAST, NetWorker, PowerPath, Unisphere, and VNX are
registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries.
VMware and vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc., in the United
States and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their
respective owners. © Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA.
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EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The
information is subject to change without notice.