The Eindhoven University of Technology is located in the center of Eindhoven, the Netherlands and is currently home to about 255 professors, 10,100 students, 243 Ph.D. graduates, 1,250 foreign students and 3,145 regular employees. Yearly, the Eindhoven University of Technology produces almost 3,000 scientific publications, 140 PhD-awards, and 40 patents. As the storage needs of the university grew, each department procured, deployed and managed their own storage resources. The inefficiencies of having separate storage arrays in data centers throughout the TU/e campus became apparent. Each storage array needed to be managed and maintained separately. Devices were over-provisioned with excess unused capacity. A change was clearly needed.
After completing their due-diligence by evaluating proposals from each of the leading storage providers, TU/e chose Zadara as their storage partner. As Huub De Hesselle, Strategy & Policy Advisor for TU/e described, “once we reviewed the solutions in our tender, Zadara Storage offered the best fit.” The Zadara Storage On-Premise-as-a-Service solution offered the following key benefits: 1) replaced CapEx storage with OpEx storage, 2) leveraged Storage-as-a-Service providing scalable, elastic storage services to TU/e and TU/e researchers, 3) reduced the maintenance overhead; and 4) ensured data availability and integrity through remote mirroring.
“Our data storage is the base of operations for nearly every application we run. It was critical that we chose the right storage solution,” said Thieu Mennen, Manager Back Office at TU/e. “By centralizing our storage services on Zadara Storage, we have increased our agility, reduced cost and improved data security.”
“Zadara has proven to be a valuable partner throughout the deployment process by accommodating our unique needs and helping us define specific solutions to our challenges,” said Huub De Hesselle, Strategy & Policy Advisor at TU/e. “We were pleased to find a partner who has gone above and beyond our basic requirements.”
“TU/e is an excellent example of an organization who has recognized the benefits of OpEx-based, Storage-as-a-Service,” said Dani Naor, vice president, international sales at Zadara Storage. “They were able to deploy an on-premise solution, providing scalable, elastic storage services to their internal clients and also protect against unexpected disasters with remote mirroring.”
