East Carolina University Registers Energy Savings With EMC Complete Package

EMC Corporation announced that East Carolina University (ECU), an university in North Carolina with more than 27,000 students and 7,000 faculty and staff, has achieved substantial cost savings and improved data protection with its new backup, recovery and archiving strategy and the consolidation of its vast server and storage environment.

"Our information assets have doubled annually for the last three years as students, faculty and the administration have embraced technology for email, academic research, video-based distance learning, collaboration and many other functions of university life," said Joe Norris, Chief Technology Officer, East Carolina University. "Because of this growth, our datacenter was running out of power capacity and physical space and backup windows were expanding rapidly. We urgently needed to become more efficient or build a new datacenter. Since a new datacenter was too costly, we engaged EMC Global Services in a multi-staged initiative to retool our infrastructure and deliver more value and efficiency. We’ve saved millions of dollars, energy consumption is down and we’re safeguarding our data better. And we even have room to grow and offer enhanced services to the university community."

ECU’s initiatives have included consolidating their stand-alone file servers with EMC Celerra, virtualizing with VMware software, and converting servers to an EMC CLARiiON boot-to-storage area network (SAN) model. With these changes, ECU was able to eliminate 156 servers and enable $1.8 million in savings — more than 18 percent of ECU’s budget — in reduced equipment overhead and cost avoidance. Power consumption was decreased by 660 megawatts per year.

ECU also has taken steps to improve IT efficiency with enhanced backup, recovery and archiving solutions. For example, the university’s Joyner Library needed long-term storage for its collection of newly digitized historical North Carolina documents. ECU’s IT organization used the EMC Rainfinity File Management Appliance to archive the scanned historical documents from EMC Celerra NS80G network-attached storage (NAS) gateway to EMC Centera content-addressed storage.

Brent Zimmer, Assistant Director of Enterprise Storage Technologies, East Carolina University, said: "With 450 terabytes of storage and new applications coming on board, we always have an eye on shrinking our backup windows. We’ve used Rainfinity to archive thousands of historical documents from production to EMC Centera, which reduced backups from 10 hours to a couple of minutes. Because of the success of the library collections project, we plan to use Rainfinity to archive other types of data, such as medical images that take up huge amounts of space on our production systems, to Centera."

The pressure on growing backup operations has been also alleviated as a result of archiving other applications. ECU uses EMC DiskXtender software to move document images that are inactive for 24 hours from CLARiiON fibre channel disk to less costly ATA disk on the Celerra. Additionally, ECU archives Microsoft Exchange emails older than 90 days from CLARiiON to Centera to comply with email retention regulations. Altogether, ECU has saved eight terabytes of production storage through archiving to Centera. To further streamline backup and restore processes, ECU is now backing up its enterprise servers to EMC CLARiiON CX-80 disk rather than tape.

"As our Exchange users grew to 50,000 strong, nightly tape backups of Exchange were taking four to five hours and retrieving a specific email from tape for legal discovery could take 60 hours," said Zimmer. "With archiving, we’ve reduced the production Exchange database from two terabytes to just one terabyte, which has contributed to faster backups, and perform legal email discovery in less than an hour."

ECU’s information infrastructure is also critical for storing large video files from the university police department’s 30 continuous-feed video cameras across campus. Rather than having individual storage units for each camera, the university has allocated thirty terabytes of EMC Celerra NAS to store the footage centrally.

"EMC Celerra is a secure and high-performance repository for these videos, allowing our security staff to view them immediately if there are any incidents on campus," said Zimmer. "We know the videos will be there, making the campus a safer place."

ECU leveraged the RSA Data Loss Prevention RiskAdvisor service, scanning more than 50 servers and 1500 desktops across their infrastructure to identify and protect sensitive data, such as social security and credit card numbers or private medical details. This service takes advantage of innovative technologies from RSA, the Security Division of EMC, and generates a detailed report that identified the systems that contained sensitive information, the users who owned the information, and the level of risk associated with those systems so that ECU’s IT organization could ensure the management of this data complied with privacy and security regulations.