Customer Success

Shanghai Ocean University

Huawei Symantec N8000 and Symantec FileStore Help Shanghai
University Strengthen Storage Infrastructure

With almost 100 years of expertise in the oceanic sciences, Shanghai Ocean ORGANIZATION PROFILE

University is making a century of compounded wisdom available 24×7 to its Website: www.shfu.edu.cn
Industry: Education
20,000 students and staff in a virtual library. To meet the demands of delivering
Headquarters: Lingang New City,
unstructured data in a fast-paced academic environment, the university’s IT Shanghai, People’s Republic of
China
team turned to Huawei Symantec for an integrated storage and backup solu- Employees: 20,000 students
tion to power the school’s digital library into the next century. Benefits include and staff

reclaiming a projected $700,000 USD in storage costs, centralized data protec-

symantec SolutionS
tion, and hours of IT staff time saved daily. Data Protection
Storage Management

100 years of expertise available in moments

Disseminating nearly 100 years of oceanic science expertise in a dynamic, downloadable environ- Why Symantec?
ment, Shanghai Ocean University seems to have found the balance between accumulated wisdom
and instant gratification. · Scalable storage
solution for
Established in 1912 as a technology center and educational leader for aquaculture, Shanghai data growth
Ocean University has grown into an academic community of approximately 20,000 students,
professors, and support staff. · Maximizes top-level
storage resources
Now offering 33 undergraduate and graduate degrees in a wide variety of sciences—from biotech-
nology to marine ecology—the university has launched a massive online library of videos and e- · Consolidates
books to support mobile learning. Last year, the university moved into a brand new 300-acre various platforms
campus in Lingang New City, a town within Shanghai proper. The move gave the IT team a chance throughout company
to start from scratch.

With the opportunity to build the data storage system it wanted instead of adding on to an out-
dated infrastructure, Shanghai Ocean University team turned to Huawei Symantec—a joint partner-
ship between telecommunications giant Huawei and data management specialists Symantec—to
build an infrastructure with the availability, reliability, and scalability its growing academic
community demands.
 Customer Success Shanghai Ocean University
Meeting deep data needs
On top of meeting the digital library needs of
the campus, the IT team knew the system it
designed would soon need to accommodate
a new high-performance computing environ-
ment. “We were already managing 100 tera-
bytes of e-books and videos for the digital li-
brary, and we could see we were going to need
more space soon for the new supercomputing
center,” recalls Ke Lisin, chief of network
systems for Shanghai Ocean University.
To gain control over its storage environment
and ensure future scalability, the team de­
ployed the Huawei Symantec N8000 Cluster
NAS System with Symantec FileStore and
Veritas NetBackup™ technology to provide a
comprehensive data storage and data
protection solution.
With the N8000, a high performance file serving
solution, the IT team has the capability of scal-
ing up its capacity to eight petabytes of data.
The N8000 also enables the team to consoli-
date management of backup and recovery,
using data snapshots and Dynamic Storage
Tiering (DST) to determine the most efficient
storage locations for its data over time.
“Huawei Symantec Oceanspace N8000 offers
us the scalability and flexibility we need.
When we add our high-performance comput-
ing center, we can grow our storage as neces-
sary without buying extra storage systems or
servers,” Lisin says.
Reclaiming a projected $700,000
USD in storage costs
Using the automated features of N8000
build-in DST, the team is on the road to real-
izing benefits by creating an automated
tiered storage plan, keeping its most fre-
quently accessed data on premium, tier-one
storage devices and its less used, older data
on more affordable storage devices.
“Our most highly used data—such as email
and supercomputing center research data—
are on Fibre Channel disk, and we’re looking
at moving our other data onto SATA disk with
N8000 DST. It’s really going to optimize our
storage environment,” Lisin says.
SolutionS at a glance Business Results and
Key Challenges
Technical Benefits
• Gain control over 100 TB of • Reclaiming a projected $700,000 USD in
unstructured data storage with Dynamic Storage Tiering
• Enhance and consolidate data protection • Centralized, streamlined campus-wide
• Offer maximum availability of digital media backup and restores
in 24×7 academic environment • Rapid storage scalability can accommodate
data growth
Symantec Products • Giving hours of daily productivity back
to IT department
• Symantec™ FileStore
• Veritas NetBackup™
Huawei Symantec Products
• Huawei Symantec Oceanspace
N8500 Cluster
Symantec Partner
• Huawei Symantec
(www.huaweisymantec.com)
Symantec Services
• Huawei Symantec Gold Technical Support
Service Package
Because most organizations access only 10 “Our most highly used data—such
percent of their data frequently, 90 percent as email and supercomputing
of the university’s library data could be redi-
rected to less expensive storage using DST research data—are on Fibre Channel
technology.1 With tier-one Fibre Channel disk, and we’re looking at moving
storage costing around $10,000 USD per our other data onto SATA disk with
terabyte—about five times that of tier-two
and tier-three SATA storage—the team is N8000 DST. It’s really going to
expecting savings of more than $700,000 optimize our storage environment. ”
USD by using N8000 to manage its 100
terabyte digital library. 2 Ke Lisin
Chief of Network Systems
Shanghai Ocean University
 Customer Success Shanghai Ocean University

“Huawei Symantec Oceanspace
N8000 offers us the scalability and
flexibility we need. When we add
our high-performance computing
center, we can grow our storage as
necessary without buying extra storage
systems or servers,” Lisin says.
The team can then define its own policies to
automate the online movement of files be-
tween tiers based on criteria such as when
the file was created, how frequently it is ac-
cessed, file size, file name, or file owner.
Since the data is moved dynamically to dif-
ferent tiers based on the policies, the team
can reclaim tier-one storage space without
” expending additional IT resources.
With automated N8000 snapshot backups
being captured by NetBackup regularly, the
team is able to backup more frequently and
reliably while reclaiming IT productivity time.
“With Veritas NetBackup, we’re saving hours
of IT time in each department each day. Before
it was all done manually, and each depart-
ment had its own solution,” Lisin says. “Now
we’re centralized and we’re automated.”

Ke Lisin Providing the structure for growth
Chief of Network Systems
Shanghai Ocean University The N8000 with Symantec FileStore technol-
ogy offers the Shanghai Ocean University
team the high availability and performance it
needs to serve its collection of 100 terabytes
of unstructured data files—e-books, images,
audio, and video files—around the clock to
support a thriving academic environment.
The team also expects to incorporate dedu-
plication and fine tune its DST rules in the
near future. It’s a solution that has the uni-
versity poised for delivering the next 100
years of oceanic research. “Now we have a
storage architecture that will help us react
quickly to meet the challenges of the future,”
Lisin sums up.

The university also can configure its Ocean- 1.

2.
space N8000 system to dynamically migrate
file services if a node should experience fail-
ure. This flexibility offers IT a comprehensive
failover solution to minimize planned and
Andrew Leung, University of California, 2008 study
10 TB of tier-one Fibre Channel storage × $10,000 USD per TB
= $100,000 USD;
90 TB of tier-two and tier-three storage × $2,000 USD per TB =
$180,000 USD;
100 TB of tier-one Fibre Channel storage × $10,000 USD per
TB = $1,000,000 USD; $1,000,000 USD – $280,000 USD =
$720,000 USD savings

unplanned downtime across its systems.

Oceanspare N8000 also gives the team the
ability to grow, shrink, or reconfigure the
system without downtime.

Reclaiming hours each day for IT

The team is also realizing better price-perfor-

mance value with the Oceanspace N8000
with Symantec FileStore and Veritas
NetBackup technology”. Because NetBackup
runs directly on the NAS system, the univer-
sity can unify data protection under one solu-
tion without affecting application server
performance. Unlike traditional NAS systems
that require information be backed up over
IP networks, N8000 enables information to
be backed up over high-performance SAN
network. This reduces the backup window,
but perhaps more importantly enables high-
speed data recovery.

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