U Maryland Implements Storage Array for Virtual Infrastructure
The University of Maryland's
Department of Transportation
Services has implemented a high-performance storage array to support
its new virtual infrastructure.
The department manages services such as campus parking and the Shuttle-UM
transit service, and it has been implementing technology solutions to streamline
the management of those services. One of those technology solutions is a virtual
parking permit system that uses vehicle license plates as parking permits.
Parking enforcement vehicles equipped with license plate recognition cameras
scan the plates to ensure vehicles are parked in their permitted lots.
The University of Maryland DOTS recently virtualized 90 percent of its
infrastructure with 17 VMware ESX virtual servers and it uses the virtual
servers, along with two physical HP servers and several Microsoft SQL databases
to support its virtual parking permit system, network shares, website,
applications and other systems.
These systems require significant storage capacity and performance. The
department was using a storage area network (SAN) solution, but the staff found
the user interface difficult to use, and as the department's data storage
requirements grew, it needed a more cost-efficient solution to increase its
storage capacity. In its search for a new storage solution, the IT team's wish
list of features included tiered storage, data deduplication and archiving,
innovative data replication and WAN (wide area network) optimization, as well as
an easy-to-use interface.
The team selected the
StorTrends Dual Controller iSCSI SAN to replace its legacy SAN. The
department has already migrated its LUNS virtual machines to the StorTrends
solution with the help of the solutions ManageTrends user interface and its
VMware plugin, and according to the company, the system has delivered
"exceptional processing speeds" with CPU and memory to spare.
The IT team aims to complete its transformation to a fully virtualized
infrastructure in the near future, and as part of that process, the department
plans to implement more StorTrends storage arrays to support its secondary
disaster recovery site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.