STORAGE

Open Cyber University to meet their growing storage requirements needed to add powerful storage services to their existing IBM storage arrays and at the same time cost-effectively expand disk capacity using affordable ATA storage arrays. The existing IBM FastT arrays lacked powerful virtualization features and the ability to openly mirror data to new low-cost disk solutions readily available in the marketplace. Instead of replacing the IBM systems, Open Cyber University turned to DataCore SANsymphony to upgrade the existing IBM storage investment and allowed the University to pool its storage resources together while adding lower-cost ATA disk arrays. SANsymphony was selected since it enabled the existing IBM storage to remain productive and work with other storage. SANsymphony provided a centrally managed storage solution that opened up flexibility, enhanced productivity, greatly simplified administration and optimized disk utilization across the different types of storage. "We are an Open University, therefore it was only logical that we un-lock our disks from specific vendor storage limitations and build an open storage architecture that would give us the hardware choice and flexibility to incorporate new low-priced market solutions as we needed them", stated IT manager and Ph.D. Hyoungchul Kim. Open Cyber University is the first of its kind in providing online education in Korea. OCU exchanges credits and lecture content between a consortium of fourteen major universities. OCU provides a new paradigm of 'open education' and 'lifetime education'. The aim of the University is to open up the opportunity of high quality professional education to everybody through the cyber world. It is open to everyone and is accessible everywhere. SANsymphony's vendor-independent approach allows network administrators to distribute and manage available disk volumes from mixed storage devices within the networked storage pools and serve capacity to any application server on an as-needed basis. "We have a tight budget and can't afford to replace our existing investment of IBM FastT arrays. DataCore SANsymphony allowed us to use what we had, added universal storage services that worked across different arrays, and opened up the architecture to meet our future demands." stated IT operations manager, Jinkyu Kim. Open Cyber University Visit: www.ocu.ac.kr/foreign/english/index.asp For more information: www.datacore.com.