U Western Ontario Implements Hybrid Storage for Online Lectures
The University of Western Ontario has
implemented a hybrid storage appliance to ensure continuous availability of its
online video lectures.
In response to demand from students and faculty, the university has recently
begun making recordings of lectures available online. However, the need to
store, play back, share and replicate video meant the university needed to
deploy a new media server and increase its storage capacity and performance.
The IT team checked out storage appliances from various vendors, looking for
one that could meet its needs for capacity and performance, as well as
reliability. Ultimately, they chose a hybrid storage appliance from
StorTrends.
The university had already been using two StorTrends 3200i storage systems in
a virtual environment with great success for the past seven years, so they felt
very confident in their decision to expand their StorTrends implementation.
"When I started here there were already two StorTrends 3200i's that had been
here for about four to five years," said Clint Bourdeau, network systems
specialist at the university, in a prepared statement. "They ran flawlessly,
untouched for about two more years. I didn't even have to reboot the boxes. I
really paid very little attention to them. So when it was time to add storage
for our video project, I was already looking in StorTrends' direction."
The StorTrends hybrid appliance offers expansion capabilities up to 256
TB, providing ample space for the university's online video storage.
According to the company, the appliance "delivers extreme throughput
capabilities and true enterprise-class performance along with WAN optimization,
automated data tiering and thin provisioning features" to support the
university's video streaming initiative.
In conjunction with the online video streaming project, the university is
also using StorTrends to provide centralized file storage support for its
Hyper-V environment and snapshot backup for its data recovery processes.
The University of Western Ontario is a public research university located in
London, Ontario, Canada, serving more than 22,000 full-time students.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].