StorMagic, Educated Choice for University of Liverpool

StorMagic, developer of iSCSI SAN management software, announced that the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department is the latest adopter of the StorMagic SM Series iSCSI Storage Area Network (SAN) solution for SMBs. The department made this decision as part of its transition from the existing direct-attached RAID systems to a virtualized SAN environment.

Founded in 1982 and counting more than 500 undergraduate students, 44 permanent members of staff and 50 research assistants/PhD students, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool is a leading center for teaching and research. Supporting these users, there was a storage infrastructure comprising three RAID systems storing 5 TB of data, and DLT tape drives directly attached to two servers via a SCSI interface. Of these RAID systems, two were connected to a server dedicated for staff filestore, while the other was connected to another identical server for student filestore. In a move aimed at making the storage more efficient, the StorMagic SM Series iSCSI SAN was deployed to network the existing resources and protect 4 TB of data.

“Because of the nature of our department, our users generate vast amounts of data and want to have access to a technology infrastructure that offers them very high availability and performance 24/7,” said Kenneth Chan, principal experimental officer at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. “The existing RAID systems were directly attached to the servers and as a result, they were becoming marginalized. We decided that networking our storage would be more effective, and the StorMagic system was the answer for us.”

Chan’s team chose the StorMagic solution because of its high reliability, performance, technical support, and the ability to work cross-platform on Windows and Linux. Today, the system acts as filestore to Windows XP and Linux clients.

“Forward-thinking small to medium organizations are moving away from a direct-attached storage model, and embracing networked solutions, which can maximize their existing resources while lowering administration time and overall cost,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of sales and marketing at StorMagic. “The University of Liverpool Computer Science Department realized that the StorMagic SM Series would provide them with a more flexible solution without the need to replace the existing infrastructure.”

“The StorMagic system is effectively a SAN that uses existing Ethernet cabling and ‘ordinary’ Ethernet switches hence, it eliminates the need for a Fibre Channel infrastructure, which tends to be complex and costly,” continued Chan. “We plan to also deploy our StorMagic system for near-line disk-based archiving.”

StorMagic SM Series is an iSCSI-based Storage Area Network (SAN) solution designed specifically for SMBs to help them store, share, manage and protect data through a single, easy-to-use interface. Non-disruptive data migration, consolidation, and management are now accessible to SMBs without the higher cost and complexity of typical SAN solutions. Data protection is performed locally using RAID and snapshot technologies for backup, data retention, or compliance purposes.