Falmouth updates storage with new SAN

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University College Falmouth (UCF) has built a foundation for its future growth as a specialist multimedia education facility with a recent migration to a new storage area network (SAN).

UCF is one of the UK's leading university colleges of art, design, media, and performing arts and found that the increased use of multimedia technologies in the delivery of its courses led it to rapidly outgrow its legacy storage IT infrastructure.

Nathan Prisk, head of IT at UCF said a project to digitise 15 years worth of VHS recordings and make them available, digitally streamed, to students highlighted the need for a more flexible storage system that could grown with the institution's needs. "We had a SAN," he said.

"But it was just being used like a very large hard disk, with no real extra resilience or tolerance. We were keen to kind a new provider who could partner with us and help us with our specific needs around Exchange, Oracle and digital streaming."

Prisk said the university had done a lot of the preliminary work involved in making centralised storage and resources available to its 3,000 students no matter where there were, on or off campus. It had installed a new, £1-million network and wanted storage technology to capitalise on it.

The Axiom SAN storage system selected from Pillar Data Systems consolidates operational, academic and personal data held within UCF's new IT infrastructure, which underpins operations at its Hub Tremough campus. Its operational Oracle systems are now centralised and the new network will also easily accommodate the addition of a new CCTV security system.

The particular benefits of the Axiom system over others who answered UCF's call to tender were a predictable and straightforward pricing structure, as well as a modular approach to growing capacity. "With Pillar, the addition of extra storage wasn't linked to additional licences or fibre connections," said Prisk. "And the system is actually more resilient and works better and faster, the more data you put into it."

Prisk added that, since the system went live in September last year, in time for the current academic year with 25 terabytes of capacity, he has already ordered another 10TB for the CCTV deployment and an extra 10TB of additional capacity for additional video streaming. "We have the system to gown our capacity with us now," he said.

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