CURTIN UNIVERSITY
EMC, VMware, and Cisco accelerate online learning spaces
and global research collaboration with private cloud
Curtin University in Perth is Western Australia’s largest and most multi-cultural university with
6,000 staff and 44,000 students, including 18,500 international students. The university was
witnessing exponential growth of its data assets due to digitizing huge volumes of paper records
and shifting much of its teaching, learning, and research environment to an online experience. As
data volumes approached a half petabyte, Curtin had to reexamine its IT architecture to handle
ever-growing volumes of “Big Data” and deliver IT-as-a-Service.
ESSENTIALS
Challenges
• Exponential data growth was difficult to
support with a physical infrastructure
• Lengthy lead times were needed for
provisioning new services
• A large number of distributed data centers
made inefficient use of resources
• The University was dealing with
availability and recovery risks
Solutions
• VCE Vblock 1 Infrastructure Platforms
• EMC Avamar backup and recovery solution
with integrated data deduplication
• EMC NetWorker backup and recovery
solution
• EMC PowerPath V/E multipathing
• VMware View desktop virtualization
Key benefits
• Consolidated from 15 data centers to two
• Dramatically reduced power and cooling
requirements
• Accelerated new service delivery from
weeks to hours or minutes
• Achieved 98 percent data deduplication
Peter Nikoletatos, Curtin University’s chief information officer, explains, “With our tech-savvy
students and researchers sharing more online information with colleagues worldwide, we needed
the right cloud infrastructure to meet the universal accessibility requirements for this growing
and changing academic environment.”
“Our previous infrastructure was based on physical hardware and spread across 15 data
centers,” continues Nikoletatos. “Delivering new services was very time consuming. We also
suffered from extensive data duplication, and backups to tape could take 24 hours. We weren’t
even confident we could reliably restore our backups.”
SOLID ROADMAP FOR HYBRID CLOUD
To advance its journey to cloud, Curtin implemented VCE Vblock® 1 Infrastructure Platforms
comprised of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers, Cisco Nexus switches, EMC®
Celerra® network-attached storage, EMC Ionix® Unified Infrastructure Manager, and VMware®
vSphere™ virtualization. Curtin also uses EMC’s PowerPath®/VE multipathing solution; EMC
Avamar® data deduplication, backup, and recovery; EMC NetWorker® backup and recovery; and
VMware View™ virtual desktop technology.
Curtin now runs most institutional applications and databases in its private cloud, including its
Blackboard student system, FinanceOne accounting, Alesco human resources, Microsoft® SQL
Server® database, and Microsoft Exchange email. In addition, Curtin has implemented a public
cloud using tools such as iTunes for content distribution, Microsoft Live@edu for communication
and collaboration, and Microsoft Azure for delivering Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
“As we looked at adopting a hybrid cloud, we recognized it takes a lot of experience to design the
right infrastructure,” says Nikoletatos. “We’ve had a long, strong relationship with EMC, VMware,
and Cisco, and we were confident that their extensive cloud expertise and advanced technologies
would provide us with the right roadmap for cloud.”
MAXIMIZING IT EFFICIENCY
Curtin has achieved massive data center consolidation and virtualized 95 percent of its servers.
As a result, the university has seen a drop in energy use, reducing its carbon footprint and
improving its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) score, a standard developed by The Green Grid
consortium.
Customer Profile
“By adopting a cloud infrastructure, we’ve gone from 15 data centers to just two,” reports
Nikoletatos. “This has a direct impact on our carbon footprint because it has reduced the number
of physical racks we need as well as all of the power and cooling that’s required. We’ve actually
doubled our capacity in a fraction of the space.”
Nikoletatos also sees virtualization extending well beyond the data center. “Today’s educational
and research experience is no longer bound to the classroom or lab. The Vblock infrastructure
provides the path for us to integrate our private cloud with a public cloud, extending
virtualization to desktops and mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads.”
STREAMLINING SERVICE DELIVERY
Moving IT into the cloud has streamlined the delivery of new services, simplifying the process for
both university end users and Nikoletatos’s staff.
“With our cloud, we can respond to new service requests in hours, sometimes minutes, instead
of weeks,” says Nikoletatos. “We’ve also reduced the skill level needed to provision services by
automating the process and minimizing the choices our customers need to make. It’s now all
about managing information instead of assets.”
Cloud computing has also redefined the way IT is managed financially. Traditionally, the IT budget
was driven by cycles of large capital investment for system refreshes. Today, IT is run like a utility.
Nikoletatos explains, “As user demand grows, we can quickly allocate the necessary assets. But
during periods when the university is closed for break, we can also consolidate and only pay for
what we use at that time. EMC and VMware have been instrumental in helping us make this
model work.”
ACCELERATING BACKUP AND RECOVERY
The EMC Avamar and NetWorker solutions also ensure fast, reliable backup and recovery of
Curtin’s virtualized environment.
Curtin University is currently about 85 percent virtualized and uses EMC Avamar deduplication
backup software and system to protect its two Vblock platforms and over 900 virtual machines.
Curtin’s Avamar system is located in a separate third data center on campus, which sits on a
different power grid from its other two data centers. Backups are performed over the university’s
LAN, giving the university a very cost-efficient measure of disaster recovery protection. Nikoletatos
notes that Avamar’s proficiency at both physical and virtual backup and restore played an
invaluable role in helping them transition servers from physical to virtual as they migrated
systems onto their Vblock platforms. And like the Vblock platform, Curtin’s Avamar system has
been able to scale quickly to keep pace with the rapid provisioning that goes on in a large
research university’s IT environment.
“By using Avamar, we achieve about a 98 percent deduplication rate on our backup, which
reduced our window from 24 hours down to just two hours,” says Nikoletatos.
“We’re also able to recover information in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks,” he adds.
“This is essential for maintaining the high availability of resources that our students and
researchers access via the cloud.”
TAKING ON COSMIC-SIZED DATA
Looking toward the continued evolution of Curtin’s cloud environment, Nikoletatos sees cloud
computing playing a central role in supporting exciting new research projects in medicine,
astronomy, and other data-intensive disciplines planned at the university. One, in which radio
telescopes will be used to capture images of the universe, will bring new meaning to “Big Data.”
“The size of data that our scientists are talking about is extraordinary—exabytes, zetabytes,” says
Nikoletatos. “That’s why we rely on our strategic partners like EMC and VMware who understand
very large datasets and can help us figure out how to manage them effectively in the cloud.”
“Leveraging this intersection of Big Data and the cloud is a transformation that will bring our
world-class research and learning to a new level,” concludes Nikoletatos.
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EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Avamar, Celerra, Ionix, NetWorker, PowerPath, and Vblock are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC
Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware, vSphere, and VMware View are registered trademarks or trademarks
of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective
owners. © Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 02/12 Customer Profile H8997
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