The decision to move to a new storage system is rarely an easy one, but officials at the University of Greenwich School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences recently realized it was the most effective choice. The organization’s old system experienced performance issues during periods of high network traffic. ComputerWeekly contributor Antony Adshead reported that faculty and students were frustrated with the five- and 10-minutes login times to the IT system.
The university decided to adopt a Nexenta storage platform to replace the old system. As Adshead noted, the solution consists of a SuperMicro server with SSDS for caching and is connected to the university’s existing storage environment with fibre channel technology. Nexenta’s platform is built on software-defined storage, a paradigm that decouples the architecture from the hardware. This offers customers enhanced flexibility by creating a pool of shareable IT resources.
“Storage software is less costly and you’re not tied to any one vendor,” said Frank Razaghzadeh, head of support at the school, according to the news source. “We didn’t want to reduce cost if we weren’t going to get the performance, but we got good responses to the Nexenta pilot from students, and that’s our key performance indicator (KPI). With HDS we were getting 30 percent of students saying they suffered slow logins. Now that number is zero.”
Another benefit of Nexenta’s solutions is that the platform comes with a high level of support. Razaghzadeh said that this level of quality service was lacking in some of the other vendors that the university considered.
As Seagate Builder Alliance partners, Nexenta and SuperMicro are able to leverage the expertise and solutions of other leaders in the cloud storage industry. This enables both companies to provide the most effective solutions for their customers’ unique needs.
