University of Western Ontario Relies on StorTrends

StorTrends (American Megatrends, Inc.) announced that the University of Western Ontario has furthered its investment in the selection of its storage appliance to deliver continuous availability for video-taped lectures offered online to the Western student community.

Using StorTrends hybrid rack-mount storage array, the Canadian university has optimized the storage, playback, sharing and replication of its growing library of video assets.

The University of Western Ontario, or ‘Western,’ delivers an academic experience second to none. Since 1878, The Western Experience has combined academic excellence with life-long opportunities for intellectual, social and cultural growth in order to better serve its communities. With 82 main campus buildings and a full-time enrollment of over 22,000 students, Western attracts individuals with a broad worldview, seeking to study, influence and lead in the international community.

The university identified and responded to the desire of students and faculty to video-tape lectures and make them available online to the Western community. To achieve this, it needed a new media server and a combination of increased storage capacity and performance in order to store, playback, share and replicate the video. As the University of Western Ontario’s IT team began to collect vendor quotes to meet its needs, they also wanted to consider technology that they knew would be reliable. The university had already been using two StorTrends 3200i’s in a virtual environment for nearly seven years with great success.

“When I started here there were already two StorTrends 3200i’s that had been here for about four to five years,” said Clint Bourdeau, network systems specialist, University of Western Ontario. “They ran flawlessly, untouched for about two more years. I didn’t even have to reboot the boxes. I really paid very little attention to them. So, when it was time to add storage for our video project – I was already looking in StorTrends’ direction.“

After a due diligence, Bourdeau found the StorTrends array offered features, functionality and expansion capabilities up to 256TB – just what was needed for the university’s video project. The StorTrends solution was integrated into Western’s infrastructure with active/active and active/passive configuration support. It delivers throughput capabilities and true enterprise performance along with WAN optimization, automated data tiering, and thin provisioning features. As a result, the university has the solution to meet its demands for lightning fast, reliable and functional storage for its video streaming needs. It is also expanding the StorTrends solutions utilization to include centralized file storage support for its Hyper-V environment and snapshot backup for data recovery processes.

Key StorTrends features that have benefitted the University of Western Ontario include:

• High-value affordability
• Throughput capabilities
• Performance
• Automated data tiering
• Reliability
• Ease of management

“Reliable data availability and protection are keys to the success of every enterprise,” said Justin Bagby, director, StorTrends. “At StorTrends, we have worked to perfect our proven storage appliances with the security and reliability features organizations need to achieve more with their stored information, without spending more. Organizations, such as the University of Western Ontario have done just that – worked to deliver innovative functionality to meet the changing demands of their business.“