University of Maryland Transportation Services Selects StorTrends

StorTrends (American Megatrends, Inc.) announced that the University of Maryland’s Department of Transportation Services (DOTS) has selected its storage arrays to be the core of its newly implemented virtual infrastructure.

With StorTrends, the university’s DOTS organization is able to achieve storage performance, storage tiering, data deduplication and archiving, with a user-friendly GUI at a very reasonable price.

Serving over 37,000 students and 13,000 staff (not to mention hundreds of daily visitors), the University of Maryland’s DOTS in College Park, MD is responsible for the day-to-day management of every single campus parking spot and the university’s fleet of more than 60 Shuttle-UM transit service vehicles. To support these valued student services, DOTS uses a number of technology solutions to help streamline key processes, such as the management of university parking permits.

The University of Maryland DOTS was among the first campuses in the country to implement a virtual permit system, which uses the vehicle’s license plate as its permit. To support this process, it uses license plate recognition cameras which are mounted to enforcement trucks to scan license plates to ensure they are properly parked in the correct lots. After analyzing the data in real-time, the system can alert operators when it fails to find a license plate match so that a citation can be issued.

The parking enforcement system requires an amount of storage capacity and performance to remain at optimal productivity. To support the environment, the university has recently virtualized 90% of its infrastructure using VMware. Today, the environment is comprised of 17 VMware ESX virtual servers, two physical HP servers and several SQL databases to support DOTS-specific shared drives and directories, the DOTS website and a host of other applications and systems, including its parking permit operations.

Until recently, the organization used a more expensive SAN solution that lacked a GUI that was easy to navigate. As storage capacity requirements for the DOTS system continued to explode, the organization determined that a more cost-efficient storage solution was required. The new solution needed to deliver major enterprise features all with a GUI that was simple to use. That’s when the university discovered StorTrends.

“StorTrends was the perfect fit for my environment,” said Tim Robinson, University of Maryland DOTS IT coordinator and systems administrator, “They had literally every single feature I was looking for: tiered storage, data dedupe and archiving, innovative data replication and WAN optimization – everything. Then, when I got the final bid, I was literally blown away. I couldn’t believe I was getting all of this capability for the price on the SOW.“

Since implementing StorTrends, the university has migrated its VM LUNS from their legacy storage array to the StorTrends solution. The process has been eased by the usable GUI and VMware plug-in. Now the department benefits from processing speeds and hasn’t even come close to touching top-end CPU/memory. Future plans for the department include purchasing additional storage arrays to support a secondary DR site.

“StorTrends is ideally suited for organizations like the University of Maryland DOTS that have a high demand virtual infrastructure which needs reasonably-priced enterprise storage,” said Justin Bagby, director, StorTrends. “There is no reason that an organization needs to compromise on performance or functionality just to meet budget restrictions. With StorTrends we pack in all the features organizations need while keeping costs low.“