U Illinois Implements New StorMagic SAN in 15 Minutes

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/19/08

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has chosen the StorMagic SM Series, an iSCSI-based storage area network (SAN) designed for small and medium organizations. The new implementation allows the 40,000-user university to manage and protect its data while preparing for future growth.

"Our old approach to storage was fairly traditional," said David Ruby, manager of instructional computing services. "We would buy inexpensive servers, fill them up, and then buy more servers. The equipment did not cost much, but it was getting hard to keep track of what we had and where. We knew that image size was only going to keep getting larger--the average image size is 15 gigabytes right now--and that there were going to be other demands for storage capacity. We realized that increasing the drive size was not going to address the complexity, and we needed a solution that would not tie storage to specific servers." Ruby said the installation took about 15 minutes.

The fact that the hardware supported Novell applications was important. "We are also looking at a new service using Novell iFolder to synchronize data across servers" Ruby said. "A user can have folders at one location that the iFolder client will automatically copy to another location so you can work at home and school or the office."

Other higher ed customers using StorMagic equipment include the University of Liverpool, the University of Wisconsin, and Oxford University.