Huawei Symantec Storage at Walter Sisulu University

Walter Sisulu University (WSU), established in July 2005, was named in honour of the late Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu, an icon of the South African liberation struggle and a close comrade of Nelson Mandela. As one of six comprehensive universities in South Africa, WSU has positioned itself as a developmental university focused on urban renewal and rural development.

 Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu
 (Photo from South African History online)

"WSU has become an emerging giant in higher education in South Africa with a student population of 24,000 spread across four campuses and 11 delivery sites, and it is uniquely positioned to play a significant role in the national government’s new focus on rural development in particular," said Angela Church, a WSU spokesperson.

WSU’s development has gone hand in hand with the need for improved IT infrastructure that is equipped to deal with the challenges of managing a multi-campus environment from a central point with multiple remote sites. This IT infrastructure must be equipped to protect the university’s intellectual property, provide effective disaster recovery via file sharing, and offer compatibility with current Windows, Linux, and Unix systems.

To meet these requirements, at each site, WSU has deployed units of Huawei Symantec‘s Oceanspace N8300, a unified storage platform designed for mid-range and high-end storage applications. Taking advantage of the replication and file sharing functions of the N8300, WSU is able to replicate data from the IBIKA, Queenstown, NMD, Potsdam and Buffalo-City primary data centres to the Buffalo-City disaster recovery site. Should any data site fail, the applications could be run at the Buffalo-City disaster recovery site using VMware guest OS image.

In addition, due to the hierarchical functionality of the N8300, a tiered storage structure of disks is used, with fibre channel (FC) disks for frequently used data and SATA for infrequently used data. This tiered storage capacity also makes the system future proof, as it accommodates future system design development.

The N8300 meets the University’s requirement for a server environment based on virtualisation as well as storage and data management systems located at six separate sites. Moreover, since most of the WSU applications are file applications that have been built on a network-attached storage (NAS) infrastructure, employing the N8300 is a fit since it is a unified file sharing and disaster recovery solution that is based on NAS.

"We needed a single, long-term solution to address our current and future needs. This meant allowing students and staff access to their files from any location. With our previous system, we were experiencing slow deployment times for new applications and in the procurement of new hardware," said Courtney Walker, Director of Information Communication Technology (ICT). "The benefits of the new Huawei Symantec solution were immediately apparent. Not only did Huawei Symantec implement the project in an efficient and cost-effective manner, but our overall costs have been greatly reduced since we can now manage the entire solution from a single interface and less space is being used in the data centre. There has also been a reduction in the hardware we use, there is greater protection of data due to our ability to centrally store files, and we have seen an improvement of our overall ICT system reliability."