STORAGE

IBM today announced that the University of Wyoming (UW) has completed a massive storage consolidation project built on its breakthrough IBM TotalStorage DS8100 storage server. The new storage environment at the University of Wyoming now supports a new Student Information System (SIS) that will house all of the institutions' academic data including course information, as well as student and administration records. UW is the state's only provider of baccalaureate and graduate education, research, and outreach services. With growing information and computing demands from the 15,000 students, professors and faculty staff, UW addressed the challenge by adding server and storage to its infrastructure. With even more servers likely to be added in the future, UW decided to centralize its storage to reduce IT costs and improve data management efficiency. Working with IBM Business Partner Sirius, UW consolidated its storage by building a storage area network with the IBM DS8100 as its centerpiece, allowing the university to amass up to 10 terabytes of data. The powerful, enterprise class storage server is connected to more than 20 UNIX, Linux and Windows servers and is already delivering 150% performance improvement over the previous network topology. Students and professors now have faster access to information, and IT staff spend fewer hours managing storage. "We were faced with growing data demands, escalating infrastructure costs and our systems were increasingly difficult to manage," said Bob Morrison, director of Telecommunications and System Services at UW. "Consolidating our data onto the DS8100 has alleviated all of our storage management concerns. It is one of the most strategic IT decisions UW has made in the last 10 years." UW's decision to purchase the TotalStorage DS8100 was made following an exhaustive evaluation of competitive offerings from EMC, HDS, HP and Sun Microsystems. UW chose the IBM solution based on the performance, reliability, scalability and connectivity options of the DS8100. "Customers rely on IBM to help them respond to the challenges they face by escalating growth in the datacenter and the need for information on demand," said Kristie Bell, vice president of IBM Storage. "Built with POWER5 processors, IBM's DS8000 storage series provides a resilient and long-term solution that helps customers, such as the University of Wyoming, meet their growing storage needs."