King Saud University - Middle East

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For backup and recovery, KSU chose EMC Data Domain® deduplication ... He continues, "We experienced big data growth due
KING SAUD UNIVERSITY EMC solutions simplify storage management, improve performance, and reduce costs OVERVIEW King Saud University (KSU) is the leading institute for higher education in the Middle East and ranked by the Academic Ranking of World Universities among the top 300 in the world. Operating a primary campus in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and with satellite campuses located throughout the area, the university is also one of the largest research centers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

ESSENTIALS

KSU's data has grown rapidly—from five terabytes five years ago to nearly a petabyte currently. The KSU IT department was using ten separate and siloed storage systems.

Industry

This disparate storage, sourced from a variety of providers including IBM and HP,

Higher education

supported individual applications, but presented many challenges, including

Company Size 120,000 students; 5,000 staff Business Challenges •

10 disparate storage systems resulted in issues with management, high OPEX costs, support, and cloud computing



Tape-based backup and recovery systems caused lengthy backup and recovery times

Solutions

management, OPEX costs, support, and the move to private cloud computing. Lack of centralized management for the ten systems resulted in inefficient and expensive administration. In addition, the many systems resulted in high OpEx costs. Also, there was no failover for application-specific databases stored on a single platform. And dealing with multiple suppliers was expensive and frustrating. Finally, KSU was also moving toward private cloud computing, but the disparate systems did not fully support its virtualized infrastructure. The university wanted to consolidate its storage infrastructure with a single, unified solution. KSU also wanted to replace its tape-based backup and recovery infrastructure due to long backup and recovery times. After considering a number of suppliers, including HP and Dell, KSU chose unified storage and backup and recovery solutions from EMC.



EMC VNX unified storage



EMC FAST Suite



EMC PowerPath



EMC NetWorker



EMC Data Domain

Cache), this FLASH 1st strategy ensures that hot or active data is automatically stored



VMware vSphere

on Flash for optimal performance, while less active data is automatically tiered to high



VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA)



VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)



Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle

SOLUTIONS King Saud University deployed EMC® VNX® unified storage at its primary data center. The highly scalable VNX has been configured with a mix of Flash and high density drives. Combined with the EMC FAST™ Suite (which includes FAST VP and FAST

capacity drives for the lowest overall cost per gigabyte. The university also chose EMC PowerPath® to automate data path management and failover, while optimizing load balancing. For backup and recovery, KSU chose EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage systems and EMC NetWorker® unified backup and recovery.

SIMPLIFIED STORAGE AND VIRTUALIZATION MANAGEMENT Working closely with EMC, KSU is migrating all data from its legacy storage systems to VNX. When the migration is complete, VNX will store almost one petabyte of data.

CUSTOMER PROFILE

KSU utilizes EMC Unisphere®, included with VNX, for centralized management of the

Results •

Simplified storage administration

entire storage infrastructure.



Improved performance by more

"We no longer have to phone our suppliers to conduct a reconfiguration," explains Dr.

than 48 percent in certain

Jalal Al-Muhtadi, Vice Dean of e-Transactions and Communication, KSU. "Instead, a

systems

single in-house storage administrator can now handle all of our management



Maximized storage utilization



Improved Exchange performance significantly—email delivery time has been reduced from up to two minutes to only three seconds





Provided redundancy, ensuring

He continues, "We experienced big data growth due to the automation of our many critical systems, such as eLearning. VNX is a simple, scalable solution that has helped us to centralize our IT infrastructure and meet accelerating data growth." VNX is fully integrated with VMware, the university's virtualization solution, which has resulted in many efficiencies.

availability of critical applications

"We have already created more than 50 virtual machines and have virtualized a

and data

number of critical databases," Dr. Al-Muhtadi states. "Efficiencies will be further

Enabled elimination of tape-based backup systems, reducing costs further



requirements, which illustrates the management simplicity of VNX."

Enabled anticipated three-year ROI due to lower OPEX and management efficiency

increased when we introduce self-provisioning. Authorized users will be able to access VMware to create and provision required VMs. This means that our staff will no longer have to spend time providing this need to our internal customers." King Saud University utilizes the VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) to optimize vSphere™ thin provisioning. It also uses VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to continuously monitor utilization across vSphere servers and intelligently allocate available resources among virtual machines according to business needs. In addition, VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) provides more Hypervisor compute power for running VMs.

“We experienced big data growth due to the automation of our many critical systems, such as eLearning. VNX is a simple, scalable solution that has helped us to centralize our IT infrastructure and meet accelerating data growth.″ Dr. Jalal Al-Muhtadi Vice Dean of e-Transactions and Communication at King Saud University

REDUCING COSTS As a result of the consolidation and simplification of the environment, KSU has seen a reduction in both acquisition and ongoing costs. "The VNX unified storage environment has also significantly reduced costs. Legacy platforms have been retired, minimizing OpEx, including cooling, power, maintenance, storage space, and licensing," says Dr. Al-Muhtadi. VNX and FLASH 1st also help to maximize storage utilization, further reducing costs. "Prior to unifying our storage environment, some of our platforms only had 20 percent storage utilization. With VNX and FLASH 1st, we effectively utilize the right tier of storage for the data's activity level," he continues. With VNX's simplified management interface, high storage utilization, and scalability to handle future data growth, the IT department anticipates that VNX will pay for itself in only three years.

SPEEDING PERFORMANCE, ENSURING AVAILABILITY In addition to providing improvements in management and costs, the EMC solutions have enabled the university to speed performance and ensure availability. Dr. Al-Muhtadi says that with VNX, performance has increased dramatically: "As an example, when Microsoft Exchange was running on our previous storage systems, there was an IOPS bottleneck that reduced performance. But with VNX, Exchange performance is significantly improved—email delivery time has been reduced from up to two minutes to only three seconds." And because applications and data now share a unified, high performance environment, KSU no longer experiences the inherent risks and costs associated with siloed storage platforms. "Historically, a number of our mission-critical applications were supported directattached storage. In the event of a failure, those applications would be unavailable, interrupting student and staff activities," explains Mr. Abdulla Alawwad, Data Center Manager, Deanship of e-Transactions and Communication, King Saud University. "With VNX, all of our critical applications enjoy a unified environment characterized by high performance and redundancy that significantly reduces the risk of outages."

RELIABLE, COST-EFFECTIVE BACKUP AND RECOVERY KSU will soon deploy Data Domain and NetWorker and eliminate tape from its environment. "Soon, we will completely eliminate tape and will enjoy the efficiencies of disk-to-disk backup. We chose Data Domain due to its deduplication capabilities, which will help us protect our large volume of data," states Dr. Esam Alwagait, Dean of eTransactions and Communication at King Saud University. When fully deployed, EMC Data Domain will enable the university to significantly reduce backup windows, while shortening recovery times from days to minutes. "We are implementing a full DR capability and will soon establish a secondary data center," adds Dr. Alwagait. "Data Domain is central to our DR strategy."

CONTACT US To learn more about how EMC products, services, and solutions can help solve your business and IT challenges, contact your local representative or authorized reseller— or visit us at www.EMC.com. EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, Data Domain, FAST, NetWorker, PowerPath, Unisphere, and VNX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware and vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc., in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 01/13 Customer Profile H11200

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