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“Our decision to go with Nexenta will have saved the university around $9 million over a five-year period,” said Patrick Hopewell, Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) Director. “Other storage vendors were more than 3x what we ultimately negotiated with Nexenta and yet the functionality was basically the same.”
Hopewell and his team initiated an RFP process that sought out a standard SAN solution for all enterprise services within the CIO portfolio, but wanted a solution that could also be leveraged by any department across the three campuses. Nexenta’s software-defined storage solution featuring NexentaStor was the clear choice.
“There was some initial resistance to our selection of Nexenta, but this was largely based on the reputation of legacy storage companies,” according to Hopewell. “It used to be said that no one ever got fired for going with IBM. With respect to storage, today that same expression could be applied to the major vendors. Their name recognition makes them feel like a safe bet, but there were so many benefits with Nexenta, particularly around cost, that we ultimately overcame that hesitancy.”
The university has rolled out NexentaStor with the NexentaStor HA plugin, both for the data centre and for the data centre’s disaster recovery solution. There are now more than a thousand virtual machines running in the data centre, with around three petabytes of raw storage provisioned in Nexenta. All of this is now running on commodity hardware, which has been optimised by joint efforts between Nexenta and the university.
“Large universities epitomise today’s diverse, complex and demanding organisations,” said Tarkan Maner, Chairman and CEO of Nexenta Systems. “Everything is dispersed—data, students, staff, and the IT ecosystem. The University of Toronto chose Nexenta because our approach to SDS meant that we could not only perform at the highest levels, but their storage solution continues to be safe and agile. We’ll meet their needs today and exceed their expectations going forward.”
The University of Toronto was founded as King’s College in 1827 and has evolved into a large and complex institution that now occupies three campuses: Scarborough, Mississauga, and the historic St. George campus in downtown Toronto. The EIS team, which services all three campuses, designs, procures, implements and manages all of the enterprise-level hardware, systems and network infrastructure housed in the central administrative data centre, upon which the entire university relies to deliver central IT solutions and services.
“Our relationship with Nexenta’s sales and engineering departments has been great,” added Hopewell. “We view the relationship as a two-way street: we’ve had a lot of help from Nexenta’s engineering team to help us push the envelope and deliver what we need. At the same time, we’ve done some innovative work with NexentaStor that has raised some eyebrows at Nexenta. We don’t have this kind of relationship with all of our vendors, and that’s a tribute to Nexenta’s commitment.”
