Published on 05-May-2011
Validated on 06 Nov 2012
"The XIV concept enables us to manage the capacity, not the technology. The management burden is 90 percent less than before, so we have much more time to dedicate to higher-value activities.” " - —Olivier Villin, Technical Manager, the Cnam
Customer:
Cnam - Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Video)
Industry:
Education
Deployment country:
France
Solution:
Business Continuity, Business Resiliency, Information Infrastructure, Virtualization, Virtualization - Storage
IBM Business Partner:
INETD
Overview
Founded in 1794 in a medieval monastery and a purveyor of learning ever since, the Cnam (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers) is France’s highly respected institution for continuing adult education. With a motto of “teaching everyone, everywhere,” the Cnam network spans 150 cities, 27 regional centers, and online, providing 100,000 students with academic degrees and career training.
Business need:
The Cnam needed to simplify its storage management burden and deploy a high-performing solution for its SAP needs. Its existing storage environment had reliability problems, was difficult to manage, and was unable to scale effectively.
Solution:
The Cnam worked with IBM and INETD to deploy two XIV® Storage Systems (79 TB each; one for production and one for a remote, synchronously mirrored backup), supporting approximately 180 servers running IBM® AIX®, VMware ESX, Linux® and Microsoft® Windows®, and NAS filer gateways. Supported systems include SAP financials and SAP Higher Education
Benefits:
Hot, non-disruptive migration of 30 TB of existing data
Reduced storage total cost of ownership by 60 percent and management by 90 percent
Keeps data safe through remote disaster recovery on key applications
Video
Aiming to simplify storage management and achieve higher performance, reliability and scalability, the Cnam worked with IBM and INETD to deploy two IBM XIV Storage Systems. XIV enabled nondisruptive migration, cut storage TCO by 60 percent, and dramatically reduced management requirements.
Video Transcript
0:19 Denis Coree, CIO, le cnam
The Cnam is an institution for adult education in France. Its mission is lifelong learning for everyone.
Another mission is to promote technological innovation. The Cnam is very well known for its museum. It is called the Museum of Innovation, because it contains all the machines that were first in their domain. We need a lot of servers for our traditional applications – such as management, payroll, finances, accounting, and human resources.
0:57 Eric Wong, XIV Solutions Architect, IBM Storage
A fundamental point in terms of the Cnam’s needs was to have a system that was simple to administer that allows quick deployment of virtual environments. Today, our thinking is based entirely on XIV.
1:12 Denis Coree
The migration took two weeks -- we migrated our applications without any service interruption. That was truly extraordinary. We have our core SAP applications on XIV: the SAP module for finances and accounting, and the SAP module for student management. Without a doubt, we finished this project on time and deployed a SAP module that had never been deployed before in France. It was a very ambitious goal and we accomplished it in part thanks to XIV.
1:56 Eric Wong
The primary XIV system, which shares a space in the same room, works with both virtualized servers and native ones, such as Linux and VMWare. The client was looking for the same flexibility and quick deployment that he had on the virtualized servers on the storage side of his solution. The most relevant one that we found was XIV. In addition to the primary system, the most critical data is mirrored on a second XIV system, remote from the first, protecting the environment against major failures of a specific site or bay.
2:38 Denis Coree
The XIV solution offers us the most security, knowing that during the initial phase we made a mistake which caused us to lose twelve drives, but did not lose the data!
The XIV has allowed us to reduce the costs of storage implementation and allowed the team to use their time for tasks other than the administration of storage.
The productivity has been enormous. The fact is that we once allocated two days a week to manage storage and now it takes us only two hours.
3:21 Eric Wong
What the XIV does today is free up time for administrators to think of the next evolution of their environment and be more responsive to the needs of the students and the administrative part of the organization that depends on the storage infrastructure.
3:41 Denis Coree
The XIV solution is clearly innovative and that is why we chose it. It was what we wanted: to simplify life and use our time for other matters. That was our requirement. It's good to write it, it's better to do it. And we did it.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware:
Storage: XIV
Operating system:
AIX
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2011 IBM Systems and Technology Group Route 100 Somers, New York 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America May 2011 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, AIX and XIV are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. IBM and INETD are separate companies and each is responsible for its own products. Neither IBM nor INETD makes any warranties, express or implied, concerning the other’s products. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. Offerings are subject to change, extension or withdrawal without notice. The information in this document is provided “as-is” without any warranty, either expressed or implied.