"Everyone is delighted with the new Fujitsu hyper-converged solution, which provides a scalable, versatile and cost-effective platform that positions our university as a leader in education and makes us a more attractive destination for students and professors alike." Head of Computer Science Department
Overview
Today's educational institutions need faster and reliable virtualization solutions than ever before. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provides a path to a modern, secure next-generation infrastructure. HCI simplifies IT resource management and reduces costs by unifying compute, storage and networking systems. HCI adoption is improving and many leading organizations consider it as critical to their strategic priorities.
Challenges
Our client’s individual academic departments had been building their own IT platforms, however, the University wanted to centralize all its computing requirements on a single, flexible computing platform. It needed to find the right technology partner to meet its complex needs. Client’s different academic departments had tried to build and host their own compute platforms, however, this proved to be inefficient and costly.
The University wanted to centralize its computing resources and make them flexible enough to meet the varied needs of faculty and students across its three campuses. Different departments have different requirements - some need lots of compute power, some need storage; others might need to crunch huge data sets or run processor-intensive multi-media applications.
Solution Highlights
The FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMEFLEX for VMware vSAN is an integrated system for hyper-converged IT, delivering a next-generation virtualization platform that includes compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources. VMware vSAN is the software-defined storage technology, which delivers enterprise-ready, high-performance shared storage for VMware vSphere virtual machines. The new Fujitsu hyper-converged solution provides a high-performing platform for up to 25 concurrent users, with the ability to scale as demand rises. Potentially, university could granularly scale-up or scale-out this compute and storage environment to a maximum of 64 hosts.
Benefits
University now enjoys a robust, high-performing compute platform that all departments can tap into. This means individual departments no longer need to invest in their own costly infrastructure. At the same, the increase in performance means applications run more smoothly and tasks can be completed more quickly, making students and faculty more productive.
The Fujitsu solution is also proving reliable with no technical glitches reported. In the event of any issues, StarOne IT Solutions is on hand to provide round-the-clock support and guarantee optimal up-time. Having such a resilient, scalable and high-performing platform is crucial to attracting new students and researchers. With improved compute performance and scalability, the university now have the power to run demanding applications, such as molecular modelling or deep learning pipelines for their departments.