AMSTELVEEN, 16 July 2009 – A successful cooperation between PROACT, HP and Scholten Awater has realised a professional SAN Storage environment for the VU University in Amsterdam. This IP-based environment increases the scalability of the storage environment for the VU University and at the same time improves its accessibility. Furthermore by implementing this new environment the university ensures it has an automatic failover capability which ensures access to the data even in the event of a serious disaster.
The storage solution launched today by the VU University has a gross capacity of 600 Tb, which will be expanded to 1.2 Pb in the near future. Consisting of 63 storage nodes with a mixture of SAS and SATA disks, it will be used for a wide range of applications, including Microsoft Exchange (28,000 mailboxes), VMware, file serving, various databases and back-up-to-disk. PROACT advised the VU University about the architecture as a whole and provided support for implementation. Chris Slijkhuis, operational director of VU University’s IT centre, says, “We were looking for an advanced solution for storage of our data that would also be flexible enough to grow with our needs. From today on we are secured by state-of-the-art products for storage at considerably lower costs than previously.” Lucas den Os, Managing Director of PROACT Netherlands says, “In our range of storage solutions we find that the simple linear and scalable solution is becoming more important especially in the rapidly-growing iSCSI mid-range market. Plug ‘n’ Play functionality together with an all-in-one pricing model for all software features make the solution attractive to end-users”.
