Su!e" S#$yUniversity Saves $3.6 Million and Accelerates Research with Hybrid Cloud Built on NetApp

Customer ProfileLoughborough University is one of the United Kingdom’s leading universities, with more than 13,000 full-time students, a reputation for excellence in teaching and research, strong links with business and industry, and a highly competitive sports development program. The award-winning university has 21 academic departments and more than 40 research centers and institutes. Loughborough University is the largest single-site campus in the country, with 437 acres of land. With a staff of over 3,000, the university is Loughborough’s largest employer.

The ChallengeBuilding a platform for innovationLocated in the Borough of Charnwood in the county of Leicestershire, Loughborough is a thriving town and prominent high-technology center that attracts investors from around the globe. Loughborough University focuses on making smart investments in technology, specifically those that support efficient university operations and a superior student experience.

“All university activities are underpinned by some aspect of IT,” says Dr. Phil Richards, IT director at Loughborough University. “We have a large campus and 15,000 technology users. Whether researchers are conducting world-class research, students are learning online or engaging in school activities, or university administrators are managing programs, everyone needs highly available systems and anytime, anywhere access.”

Recently, IT management identified an opportunity to significantly reduce costs and increase the return on the university’s IT investment while improv-ing IT services that support education and research initiatives. Its 30-year-old data center offered limited capacity and a low power utilization efficiency rating. The university needed to upgrade its data center and end-of-life components and faced the daunting prospect of spending $3.6 million to keep their legacy data center operating. “We were reluctant to invest our resources in a massive data center building project based on predictions,” says Richards.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

IndustryEducation

The ChallengeUnleash innovation and speed throughout the university to accelerate research in higher learning.

The SolutionLeverage a NetApp® unified storage platform for a hybrid cloud that supports the university’s education and research.

Benefits

IT costs to reinvest in higher education programs

a foundation for the future

requests for IT, accelerating groundbreaking research

Another NetApp solution delivered by:

“The FlexPod solution based on NetApp and Cisco technologies helped save us $3.6 million in data center costs. We’re able to allocate that budget to world-class research and to providing the educational programs that can make a difference in the lives of our students today and tomorrow.”Dr. Phil RichardsIT Director, Loughborough University

IT management searched for a cost-effective IT solution that would provide the bandwidth and scalability required for educational programs and world-class research for the next 10 to 15 years. The university hoped to find an innova-tive solution that would allow it to focus more resources on its core educational and research missions, as well as to improve the educational environment for students and instructors.

After considering many different cloud solutions, Loughborough University selected a hybrid cloud solution from

Berkshire, Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider, specializing in communications and collaboration; data center and cloud services; and managed services to clients across both the public and private sector.

The SolutionUnified storage platform across a hybrid cloudLogicalis UK consolidated Loughborough’s existing data center into two “minipods” that created a local private cloud, and then integrated the onsite storage environment directly with the Logicalis hosted, shared cloud services platform. The private cloud solution onsite at the university, managed by Logicalis,

includes FlexPod® data center solutions deployed at either end of the campus, with additional FlexPod solutions for extra capacity in Logicalis’ public cloud. Each FlexPod configuration is composed of NetApp MetroCluster™

storage system, Cisco Unified Computing ™

Cisco Data Center switches, with VMware® ™ and vCenter™ for virtualization.

“NetApp provides a single architecture that Loughborough University leverages to tie together the private and public clouds essential to our enhanced IT strategy,” says Richards. “We only had to learn one hybrid cloud envi-ronment, making it much simpler to manage.” Loughborough further streamlines storage management with CA Tech nologies software, which automates service delivery and the provisioning of its physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Logicalis chose FlexPod for the pub-lic and private clouds based on the solution’s flexibility and scalability, as well as the success of the long-standing NetApp and Cisco partnership. “There are few enterprise-grade clouds oper-ating today,” says Chris Gabriel, Vice

Logicalis. “The NetApp and Cisco part-nership has solidified the virtual, robust architecture of the FlexPod solution in a way that allows us to deliver a highly competitive hybrid cloud service.”

Logicalis leverages NetApp MetroCluster array-based clustering with synchronous mirroring to deliver continuous availa-bility and zero data loss. The company achieves maximum flexibility in the shared storage infrastructure of its hybrid

®, which provides secure multi-tenancy to support the storage needs of Loughborough University and other customers.

to eliminate “distributed data centers under desks,” where professors, researchers, and other personnel used local servers and storage, creating information and IT management silos.

multiple virtual storage systems within our single consolidated FlexPod plat-form,” says Gabriel. “Loughborough University faculty members, for example, can have access to their own secure, private storage environment, without the risks associated with storing their academic and administrative data in a classroom, lab, or office.”

Loughborough University recognizes Logicalis as an IT services innovator with a commitment to the educational sector, as evidenced by Logicalis’ deci-sion to connect directly into the U.K.’s premier education and research network, the Joint Academic Network, or JANET. “JANET is a highly efficient communi-cations environment with incredibly high bandwidth and competitive costs that provides us a very fast channel of communication between our local data center and the Logicalis data center in

Business Benefits$3.6 million in IT savingsWith the integrated hybrid cloud plat-form based on the FlexPod solution, Loughborough University IT delivers its services to the university from a considerably more flexible, powerful, and cost-effective IT infrastructure, with plans to virtualize the majority if its IT environment. “With our Logicalis hybrid cloud solution based on NetApp storage, we reduced our data center

“Power, cooling, and administrative expenses have been equivalently reduced and we have accelerated our service to the university community.”

The university has saved millions of dollars by eliminating the need to build a new data center, and instead can use the funds to enhance its focus on its

core educational mission. “In the case of FlexPod as an enabler for the hybrid cloud, less is definitely more,” says Richards. “The FlexPod solution based on NetApp and Cisco® technologies helped save us $3.6 million in data center costs. We’re able to allocate that budget to world-class research and to providing the educational programs that can make a difference in the lives of our students today and tomorrow.”

IT on demand and accelerated researchToday, Loughborough University leverages a highly flexible, agile IT environment to respond to the needs of university departments and its 13,000 students. Loughborough, named one of three rising stars among research-intensive universities by the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine, can launch new research projects rapidly with accelerated IT support and a flexible IT infrastructure.

“With our old data center infrastructure, procuring IT support for new research projects took weeks,” says Richards. “The hybrid cloud now enables IT to act as a research accelerator. Faculty in fields including health and life sciences, systems engineering, informatics, materials, and sustainability now receive IT infrastructure on demand, which decreases time to discovery across the university.”

Delivering IT services from an integrated storage platform that spans its onsite private cloud and the Logicalis public cloud gives Loughborough University a new level of IT service agility, appli-cation portability, and data protection. Loughborough IT and Logicalis can easily move application workloads between the university and Logicalis data centers. “The underlying technology enables a truly hybrid cloud, allowing us efficient data protection capabilities to transfer an entire data center across 200 miles and back again in minutes,” says Gabriel.

Loughborough University mitigated the risks associated with investing in a new data center based solely on predictive modeling. Instead, the university can easily adapt its flexible, scalable FlexPod solution and move IT services back and forth between its private and public cloud environments based on cost optimization and the best approach to providing an exceptional educational experience. The university also has the flexibility to burst out to additional Logicalis public cloud storage when needed for particularly data-intensive projects and services.

“The hybrid cloud based on FlexPod and MetroCluster offers us enormous flexibility,” says Richards. “Now we can quickly and cost effectively deliver the

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

Go further, faster ®

www.netapp.com

© 2012 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc.

NetApp logo, Go further, faster, Data ONTAP, FlexPod, MetroCluster,

brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their

services that support the needs of our research and academic community, and make them accessible from anywhere, anytime. We can also easily scale our data centers to accommodate growth and add new educational programs, which is vital to continuing to attract top-notch students to Loughborough University, and to offering a remarkable educational experience once they arrive.”

“There are few enterprise-grade clouds operating today. The NetApp and Cisco partnership has solidified the virtual, robust architecture of the FlexPod solution in a way that allows us to deliver a highly competitive hybrid cloud service.”Chris Gabriel

SOLUTION COMPONENTS

NetApp Products

series storage systems

Data ONTAP®

MetroCluster software

Protocols

Fibre Channel

Third-Party Products

™

CA Automation & Assurance

PartnerLogicalis www.logicalis.com