Virtualization

USC School of Business To Run Virtual Storage

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/05/09

The University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business has purchased Xiotech's Emprise 7000 storage area network (SAN) to increase network performance and improve storage management in a virtualized IT environment as the school transitions to a virtual server infrastructure.

"When our IT environment is fully virtualized, we plan to have 110 virtual machines running on six servers. So, for us, a successful transition hinged on the ability to remove the I/O bottlenecks found in traditional storage systems," said Dan Lewis, network services manager. "With Emprise 7000 we'll be able to eliminate those bottlenecks and expect to see a 200 percent increase in performance."

The school, which has 5,000 students, was especially impressed by the system's Virtual View feature, which integrates with a virtual environment and automates much of the storage provisioning and management for virtual machines. "Now we can assign and manage storage in just a few steps, saving us precious time and reducing the risk of errors," said Lewis.

The Emprise 7000 system supports up to 1,024 terabytes of data and is managed by dual, clustered storage controllers. Data communications is handled by a four gigabit/second fibre channel.