Edith Cowan University

Video Transcript

Angus Griffin, IT manager at Edith Cowan University, discusses how IBM SAN Volume Controller enables data management and provisioning flexibility.

My name is Angus Griffin. I'm the manager of IT infrastructure at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia.

ECU is a multicampus. We have 27,000 student bodies, around about 4,000 staff, two metropolitan campuses, and a regional campus around two hours south.

Progressively over the last sort of five or so years, the university's grown by a good few thousand students. That's presented us with some problems of data growth, data management.

When I started in my current role, we would have had around 50 terabytes of data between the two campuses on primary storage. We now see a rate of between 300 and 400 terabytes of data on primary storage and at least the same again on type at each site, so over a petabyte of data in total.

Along with the data growth, we've seen some significant challenges in managing that increased volume of data. And it goes across the spectrum from how do you provision the storage in a timely fashion? How do you manage projected future growth? How do you manage backups and disaster recovery? So we've used a range of the products from IBM in those different areas. We are heavy users of SAN Volume Controller.

It's given us huge amounts of flexibility in provisioning our systems, ability to change systems on the fly. We've used TCM and TCM FastBack for disaster recovery, and obviously that's become more important as the organization has grown up.

It's significantly reduced our recovery times, in some cases, from days to hours or from hours to minutes.

We've seen some significant economic benefits in that, for example, within the provisioning our capabilities of SVC give us the ability to use a small amount of today's value storage, storage that you buy in 2011, but provision a lot of storage to a system that we think will need a lot of storage in the future. That saved us a lot of money.

Throughout this relationship with IBM, the products we've put in place have given us quite a significant increase and insight into the data that we store. We can predict, in future, what different systems that we put in place might require as well.

Smart to me means using the resources that you have more intelligently. And the less money that I can spend on storage and other technologies, the more money is available for the core business of the university, which is teaching the students.