Alongside world-class research, Liverpool John Moores University manages a portfolio of over 300 undergraduate degrees and offers masters and research degrees. Based in the heart of Liverpool, the University has a community of over 21,000 students recruited from 100 countries.
Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) is a modern civic university and has been steadily automating business processes and incorporating technology into the educational experience. The University was reliant on five-year old storage area networks (SANs) at each of its two main data centres however the steadily growing use of technology across the university began to place significant strain on storage capacity and performance.
Mark Wynne, Assistant Director of IT at LJMU explained, “All of the University’s business goes through our storage infrastructure and our applications are growing consistently. Our storage needs were growing particularly fast and delivering an unacceptable user experience. Adding storage capacity to the legacy platforms would be inefficient and wouldn’t scale over time so we analysed our storage needs, developed a tender and reviewed proposals from several storage vendors.”
After evaluating several proposals, LJMU selected HP Platinum ServiceOne Partner DTP Group as their partner of choice to design a storage refresh based on HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage and HPE Proactive Care Advanced Service and implement using in-house installation, testing, data migration, EVA decommissioning and project management services.
“We recognised the technical and manageability advantages of the 3PAR platform and appreciated the native functionality for achieving online data migration in an efficient, streamlined and semi-automated manner. DTP and HPE also offered a price and performance advantage over competitive bids so we could anticipate a superior return on investment for our storage refresh.” says Wynne.
The University now has access to 24×7 monitoring, pre-failure alerts, rapid diagnosis, automatic call logging and parts dispatch for hardware support to help avoid potential performance issues or outages.
Wynne goes on to say, “Proactive Care Advanced Service provides us with regular insight into our performance and maintenance requirements. We’re even alerted when firmware updates need to be deployed which not only saves our staff members time, it also allows us to ensure top performance and optimise the use of storage resources.”
Proactive Care Advanced Service also allows LJMU to dynamically support peak period demands. “We’re now able to look at our business processes and reallocate storage capacity during busy periods,”
“For example, when university examination results are released, we temporarily promote those systems onto the solid-state tier to improve performance. The combination of our IT staff, DTP and HPE services provides LJMU with a team that works together to achieve common goals and ensure the performance of critical applications relied upon by the university community. Every application at the university depends on our storage infrastructure, so we need guaranteed uptime. We were concerned about the performance of the old hardware during the migration, but DTP migrated all the high-risk data during the quiet period and the migration was completed by the end of January.”