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UC Irvine Implements New Storage Management

The University of California Irvine (UCI) has implemented a new storage system to manage all of its virtualized workloads.

The university's previous data storage arrays were slow, out of date and causing headaches for IT staff. When virtual machines (VMs) experienced slowdowns, the legacy storage arrays couldn't pinpoint the source of the problem, and the complicated upgrade process required significant downtime.

The team went through an extensive evaluation process to identify a new storage system. When they narrowed down their options to a shortlist of vendors, they sent out a 92-question survey and used the responses to make their final selection.

They selected the VMstore T880 system from Tintri, a provider of VM-aware storage (VAS) for virtualization and cloud environments. According to John Ward, IT enterprise architect at UCI, Tintri had the best analytics, could access data from the VMware vCenter ESX hosts to detect performance issues and could report on every VM down to the disk (VMDK) level. The team also liked the fact that they could purchase encryption as a separate add-on, so they didn't have to buy it up front.

"With some other solutions, you have to buy self-encrypting disks up front," said Ward in a prepared statement. "It's great to be able to add encryption later if our business needs change."

Since implementing the VMstore T880 system, UCI has "vastly improved its storage performance with better visibility into VM performance and simplified storage management," according to the company. The new system also enabled the university to eliminate downtime for software upgrades, create snapshots and clones on a per-VM basis and access a global view of its infrastructure.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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