Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin – from DAS to SAN Environment, from 19TB to 1PB Capacity, with Infortrend Storage Solutions

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin – from DAS to SAN Environment, from 19TB to 1PB Capacity, with Infortrend Storage Solutions

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

One of the most well-known and largest universities in Germany, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, was founded in 1810 according to the concept which Wilhelm von Humboldt had put forward “Humboldt-Universität was the mother of all modern universities.” It lives up to its history as a reform-orientated institution by planting innovative ideas into study, research and structure.

Today, 35,000 students are signed up in 242 courses of studies. 384 university professors are supporting the students with their intensive education. 60 employees are working in the IT Department, and 2 of them, Mr. Sittel and Mr. Doebler are managing the SAN environment for the different faculties in the data center at the Campus Adlershof.

1999-2001 From DAS to SAN, the first contact with Infortrend

Server consolidation and the transition from DAS to SAN environments was a common trend in 1999/2000. Humboldt-Universität would like to get in on this trend for reducing the cost of buying new servers and decrease the payment for their maintenance. Furthermore, they would like to centralize the storage for better management and utilization.

Under the pressure of cost reduction, the SAN administrators have tried to find a storage product which is reliable, cost friendly and can increase capacity. By reviewing the storage solutions on the market, the suitable solution was found to be the “Infortrend’s EonStor RAID subsystems” - offering a high capacity alternative with good performance, a reasonable price, and could easily be connected with Chaparral SCSI to FC routers to build Fibre Channel SANs.

The Virtualization Demands

Beginning in 2003, Humboldt-Universität began to virtualize its storage with FalconStor. The virtualization was based on two reasons; the first one was to simplify administration, and the second was for better storage utilization.

In spring 2009, Humboldt-Universität started a new project. It awarded the tender to Infortrend’s EonStor arrays because they are much easier to integrate in a virtualized FalconStor environment, they are able to change the WWPN number, and they have very good price/ performance and quality ratio.

A Demanding IT Environment

Today, the building of all the faculties around the data center Campus Adlershof are all equipped with FC connectors, associated with the data center SAN. The SAN components are 4 DCX Brocade FC Director switches and 50 smaller Brocade departmental switches. The entire volume of FC ports is 1600. Some general facts about Humboldt-University IT environments:

• 46,000 accounts
• 9,800 workstations
• 51,000 mail addresses/ 130,000 mails per day (4 TB)
• 500 different web sites
• Hits on web servers 2.5- 3 million each day
• 210 databases on different servers
• Backup capacity 170 TB
• 130 sub network

The Purchasing History and Capacity

• 2001 - 24 Infortrend RAID arrays were purchased/ the capacity was 19 TB in the beginning
• 2003 - 36 Infortrend RAID arrays were purchased / the total capacity is 54TB
• 2004 - 13 new Infortrend RAID arrays were purchased/ the total capacity is 85TB
• 2007 - RAID arrays upgraded and replaced to Infortrend EonStor A16F-G2430
• 2009 - 52 new Infortrend RAID arrays (A16F-G2430 x36 + S16F-G1430 x16) were purchased/ total capacity is 890TB now