Business issues
As it embarked on a major upgrade of its IT environment, Eastern Illinois University sought to consolidate its data storage to position itself to achieve higher utilization of storage resources and to enhance its information management capabilities. The university also wanted to strengthen its business continuity/disaster recovery abilities, reduce current backup windows and prepare for a planned conversion to an SCT Banner collegiate-administrative solution from SunGard.

Solutions
The university selected a comprehensive information lifecycle management solution from StorageTek®. This SAN-based solution enables the university to take advantage of disk and tape storage tiers to meet its performance, capacity and cost requirements. Components of the tiered storage solution include an access-centric FLX280 enterprise storage system, a capacity-centric B220 disk system, an L700e tape library, a SAN network topology, Global Storage Manager (GSM) software and VERITAS Foundation Enterprise Suite for network backup.

Financial benefits
The use of tiered storage allows the university to gain the storage performance it needs for different applications at an affordable price. It now can better match the cost of storage with the performance requirements for different data sets.

Business benefits
The university achieved a dramatic 6:1 reduction in its nightly backup times. The backup window fell from 12 hours to just two hours. The university also gained higher confidence in its backup operations.

Technology benefits
The use of SnapShot technology positions the university to respond more easily to students who need to recover e-mail they deleted from the university’s mail server.