EMC today announced that King Saud University (KSU) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has selected EMC® technologies, including EMC VNX® unified storage with EMC FAST™ Suite, EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage systems and EMC Networker® unified backup and recovery to transform its IT infrastructure and boost business agility. KSU is also leveraging VMware® virtualization technologies.
Customer Benefits:
- Increased Performance: VNX has enabled KSU to improve the performance of its mission-critical applications by 48%, most noticeably experiencing a 40X improvement in the time needed to open an email in Microsoft Exchange.
- FLASH 1st Strategy for Increased Efficiency: Using VNX with the EMC FAST™ Suite (which includes FAST™ VP and FAST™ Cache), KSU has successfully maximized storage utilization and minimized operational costs associated with power, cooling and maintenance.
- Simplified System Administration: KSU has streamlined and centralized the management of its IT infrastructure through automation and consolidation in order to better handle rapid business growth and improve response times for IT requests from faculty and students.
- Streamlined Backup and Recovery: With Data Domain and NetWorker, KSU has replaced tape-based backup with disk-to-disk backup, reduced backup windows and shorted system recovery times from days to minutes, resulting in even further cost savings.
Customer Challenges:
KSU was experiencing many challenges due to exponential data growth —growing from just five terabytes in 2007 to nearly a petabyte in 2012. From 2010 to 2012, the university saw an explosion of data thanks to the automation of e-services, addition of e-Learning applications and the addition of an online curriculum. With this shift, KSU’s siloed storage infrastructure, made up of ten separate storage systems from a variety of providers including IBM and HP, could no longer handle this growth and support individual applications. The complex IT environment resulted in high OPEX costs and a complex system administration process that proved difficult to move towards a private cloud computing environment. KSU also faced a serious risk of downtime due to legacy, tape-based backup and recovery systems that were not only expensive but impacted system availability. KSU needed a solution that could provide the increased system performance, cost-savings and the flexibility required to meet the growing needs of its 120,000 students and 5,000 employees, as well as support its ongoing virtualization strategy.
After considering solutions from EMC, Dell and HP, KSU selected EMC VNX with FAST Suite, Data Domain and NetWorker for its new data center. With VNX with FAST Suite, KSU is leveraging a FLASH 1st strategy to ensure that hot or active data is automatically stored on Flash for optimal performance, while less active data is automatically tiered to high capacity drives for the lowest overall cost per gigabyte. By doing so, it has successfully maximized storage utilization and minimized operational costs associated with power, cooling and maintenance. KSU also selected VNX unified storage for its tight integration with VMware, enabling it to accelerate its virtualization strategy and easily create new virtual machines to provide the light level of provisioning and intelligently allocate available resources across virtual machines to meet business needs.
The university has achieved significant cost savings due to Data Domain, NetWorker and VNX – KSU’s IT department anticipates that the systems will pay for themselves in only three years.
Customer Quote:
Dr. Jala Al-Muhtadi, Vice Dean of e-Transaction and Communication, King Saud University
“EMC VNX offers us a simplified management interface, high storage utilization and the scalability to handle future data growth. The integration between VNX and VMware vSphere allows us to easily create new virtual machines to meet user demand. The centralized storage infrastructure offers us greater visibility across the environment, while simplifying storage administration and allowing us to offer uninterrupted access to mission-critical applications to our faculty, students and their families.”
“We expect to see a return on our investment in VNXin just three years and look forward to achieving greater efficiencies and reliability as we replace tape based back up with Data Domain and Networker to reduce backup windows, while shortening recovery time from days to minutes.”
EMC Executive Quote:
Mohammed Talaat, Regional Managing Director, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya, EMC
“KSU required a solution that not only enhances their storage performance but also accelerates the university’s IT transformation journey as it continues forward on its virtualization drive. In addition, the university needed a solution that offered centralized management and comprehensive visibility to simplify storage administration and provisioning requirements. With VNX EMC has helped KSU successfully achieve all these results to provide more reliable services to an increasing number of faculty, students and parents while reducing operational expenditure and management complexity.”