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Contact:
SANRAD,
Inc
Zophar Sante- zophar@sanrad.com
Hila Serrouya- hila@sanrad.co
USA
Tel:
510-521-2424
Intl. Tel: 972-3-7674802
Nationally
Acclaimed University of Michigan Unveils New State of the Art
Virtualized iSCSI IP SAN
The
University of Michigan, with its size, complexity, and
academic strength, the breadth of its scholarly resources and
the quality of its faculty and students, is one of America's
great public universities and one of the world's premiere
research institutions. The University is a community of
outstanding faculty, talented students, and committed staff
who learn and work in a stimulating intellectual environment
enriched by diverse cultural and social opportunities.
University
of Michigan Information Technology Communications Services -
or ITCom - is part of the Information Technology Central
Services Division (ITCS) of the University of Michigan. ITCom
provides mission critical services to students, faculty, and
staff at the University's Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn
campuses.
ITCom
will be providing three new services within the University.
ITCom is currently testing a new messaging system that has the
ability to combine voice, fax and email messages in a single
service. Data
storage services are also being developed for progressive
on-campus departments like the School of Information and U-M
Medical Center. Lastly,
a network infrastructure expansion project is in the process
of being deployed to include another university over 600 km
away.
ITCom
needed to expand their infrastructure to support these new
services. ITCom installed over 30 high-end servers, many in
dual-node clusters, to provide a new processing platform to
support the new services. In addition to the new servers,
ITCom required a new storage architecture that allowed volume
sharing for clustering, fault-tolerance for 24x7 services, in
addition to flexibility, performance and simple management to
provide storage services over the vast infrastructure.
Moreover, they needed to use the existing Ethernet network,
capitalize on the knowledge-base of their personnel, and avoid
expanding their staff.
The
ITCom team decided on iSCSI running over Gb Ethernet for the
storage network architecture and in-band storage
virtualization for volume management. The iSCSI Virtualization
Switch from SANRAD was selected because it provided host iSCSI
connectivity to diverse storage systems and offered in-band
volume management thru virtualization.
SANRAD
and ITCom teamed with national storage and system integrator,
YaGUSA Inc. to support ITCom during the pilot phase and
production implementation. The
products were first systematically and commercially tested in
the university (IT-COM) laboratory before heading into
production, explains Yariv Glazer, President of YaGUSA.
By using iSCSI drivers on campus computers and having the
iSCSI V Switch in the data centers, any campus server, server
cluster, department desktop, student laptop or remote system
connected to the University Ethernet network could read and
write data to FC or SCSI storage systems located within the
ITCom data centers. In addition to access and protocol
conversion, the V Switch provided ITCom administrators with a
network centric volume management solution using in-band,
block-level storage virtualization. This was an important
combination because three major projects were enabled by iSCSI
and Virtualization SSP (Storage Service Provider) or just
storage services, a new mission critical messaging system and
a network expansion project, continues Glazer.
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