By providing customised storage 'utility services' to its departments, the university says that it has enabled students, researchers, faculty and administrators to gain faster, more reliable access to information they need for collaboration, with the freedom to focus more resources on education and research, rather than IT.
 
Carl Follstad, manager of university data management services, says: Our previous storage environment consisted of a patchwork of servers and direct-attached storage scattered across the university. This made it difficult to share information and placed the burden of IT acquisition and management on individual departments. By consolidating our storage onto EMC and creating a centralised utility, we deliver and manage storage capacity for our departments much more cost-effectively than they could on their own.
 
The great thing about consolidating onto EMC is that we can allocate storage to provide the most appropriate service level for each departments needs, with the economies that come from centralised management. We have grown from 50 to nearly 300 terabytes in just one year, and we have expanded from two campus locations to eight, while managing it all with only three storage administrators. Rather than using their budgets and grants to hire storage managers, our departments should be able to support their education initiatives.
 
EMC Services employees first consolidated the universitys disparate storage onto EMC systems, and they designed and implemented a tiered storage infrastructure to support a comprehensive information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. EMC Services also provided training and knowledge transfer for the IT staff.  

The universitys critical applications, such as campus-wide e-mail, centralised calendaring, PeopleSoft for student registration and Oracle applications are stored on high-performance EMC Symmetrix networked storage. Departments with important but less critical data, such as academic health centre files, and SQL Server databases for the economics department, use EMC CLARiiON storage. Infrequently used information, such as library and laboratory images, resides on more cost-effective CLARiiON ATA storage.