For Walter Sisulu University (WSU), which has four campuses, the initial challenge was to manage a multi- campus environment from a central point of view with so many remote sites.
So said Courtney Walker, WSU director of ICT, at a breakfast that was held in East London Golf Club.
Another challenge presented was protecting the university's intellectual property as well as the need for effective disaster recovery. “We needed a single, long term solution to address our current and future need. This meant allowing students and staff access to their files from any location.
With our previous system we were experiencing slow deployment times for new applications and in the procurement of new hardware”, added Walker.
According to Walker, the university's file applications were built on a NAS infrastructures and therefore a unified file sharing and disaster recovery solution had to be implemented.
“What we requested was a multi-level hierarchy implementation to improve the reliability of the disaster recovery system. And also a tiered storage capability to accommodate future system design development”, he noted.
The university' primary system was an HP server. WSU also has Mercer, and Acer hardware, Windows, Unix, Linux and Novell Netware but believes Huawei Symantec's solutions are already visible.
“The benefits of the Huawei Symantec solution were immediately visible,” he said, adding “we can now manage the entire solution from a single interface. There has also been a reduction in the hardware we use, data storage costs and have come down and we have seen an improvement of our overall ICT reliability.”
Less space is being used in the data centre, further reducing costs. Because data files are now stored centrally, there is greater protection of data” added Walker.
Huawei Symantec has deployed N8300 units in each site and included file sharing system. Designed around the replication function of the N8300, data is replicated in the four main campuses Ibika, Queenstown, Nelson Mandela Drive and the Buffalo City primary data centre to the Buffalo City disaster recovery.
According to Huawei Symantec, based on the hierarchical functionality of the N8300, a tiered storage structure of disks is being used.
In terms of disaster recovery, if any data site fails, the application can be run at the Buffalo City disaster recovery site using VMware guest OS image. NAS files and Oracle database production data is replicated from the CLE site.
Even though implementation and deadlines were met, the unveiling took a little bit due to a long delay by Huawei Symantec's previous supplier.
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