University of Toronto Deploys OpenSDS Platform
The University of Toronto has
implemented an open source-driven software defined storage (OpenSDS) platform
to support its server virtualization, network storage and centralized data
backup systems.
The university serves more than 84,000 students and 19,000 faculty and staff
across three campuses. The Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) department
plans and manages all of the university's enterprise-level hardware, systems
and network infrastructure, which is located in a central administrative data
center and serves all three campuses.
The EIS team was looking for a standard storage area network (SAN) solution
to support all of its enterprise services and any other departments at the
university. Some of the decision makers were initially drawn to big brand names
because they felt like a safe bet, but the team eventually settled on the NexentaStor with the
NexentaStor high availability (HA) plugin.
"Our decision to go with Nexenta will have saved the university around
$9 million over a five-year period," said Patrick Hopewell, director of
the EIS department, in a prepared statement. "Other storage vendors were
more than three times what we ultimately negotiated with Nexenta and yet the
functionality was basically the same."
The EIS team worked closely with Nexenta's engineering team to implement the
system for the university's data center and its disaster recovery solution. The
NexentaStor system integrates with the university's VMware vSphere 5.5 system
running on Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware. According to a
press release from Nexenta, "there are now more than a thousand virtual
machines running in the data center, with around three petabytes of raw storage
provisioned in Nexenta. All of this is now running on commodity hardware, which
has been optimized by joint efforts between Nexenta and the university."
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].