University Of Denver Gains Seamless Storage Virtualization And Full Disaster Recovery In Cross-Campus Data Centers

Ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the United States by Newsweek, the University of Denver prides itself on graduating students who make a difference in the world. Founded in 1864, when Denver was little more than an isolated outpost for gold miners, the University of Denver has grown to over 8000 students and faculty members today. Its rich history includes a tradition of innovative scholarship and community engagement. The University of Denver sets high standards of excellence not only in its academic programs but also in the quality of services it delivers to its constituents.

Bring new applications online, optimize storage virtualization, and maintain operations in the event of a data center loss With over 200 servers, 2000 clients, growing data and applications, the University of Denver needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure with minimum disruption to its operations.

Given this demanding environment and new server virtualization projects, it could not afford downtime in backup, data migration, and implementing disaster recovery. Another key driver was its limited budget which required an economical yet robust solution.

The environment consisted of SUN servers and VMware. However "while VMware supports clustering and SAN connectivity we needed a way to have our VMFS volumes mirrored as we mirror our existing SUN campus clusters." The University required a real-time solution which would provide mirroring without having a single point of failure.