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Walter Sisulu University installs storage solution

Walter Sisulu University (WSU), established in July 2005, was named in honour of the late Walter Max Ulyate Sisulu. As one of six comprehensive universities in South Africa, WSU has positioned itself as a developmental university focused on urban renewal and rural development.

“WSU has become an emerging giant in higher education in South Africa with a student population of 24 000 spread across four campuses and 11 delivery sites, and it is uniquely positioned to play a significant role in the national government’s new focus on rural development in particular,” said Angela Church, WSU spokesperson.

“WSU’s development has gone hand in hand with the need for improved IT infrastructure that is equipped to deal with the challenges of managing a multicampus environment from a central point with multiple remote sites. This IT infrastructure must be equipped to protect the university’s intellectual property, provide effective disaster recovery via file sharing, and offer compatibility with current Windows, Linux and Unix systems,” said Courtney Walker, director of Information Communication Technology (ICT). “With our unique situation of having sites scattered within the more impoverished areas of the vast Eastern Cape, presents an intimidating challenge for us. We therefore needed an innovative solution that would help us transform the institution into a unified and manageable entity.”

“With high overhead costs and limited income, we needed to use IT creatively to reduce our overall operational costs whilst enabling students to obtain an optimum education,” he said.

The solution implemented by Huawei-Symantec is essentially a virtualised server and consolidated storage environment known as a cloud computing infrastructure which allows delivery of business services anywhere. This could be to a classroom, a student’s home or Internet café.

“The Huawei Symantec system deployed at our six principal sites, namely NMD, IBIKA, Potsdam, Whittlesea, College Street and Chiselhurst, has sophisticated data management tools that allow the university to replicate data between sites and provide data protection in case of a disaster. The infrastructure is scalable and can grow to support in excess of 75 PB of data, that is 75 000 terrabytes,” said Walker. “Although deployed at these six sites, the entire solution is integrated and managed as a single system. This means that one technician can manage the entire system from a single location. A new server can be provisioned at any of the six sites with a few key strokes at the control centre.”

To meet the requirements at each site, WSU has deployed units of Huawei Symantec’s Oceanspace N8300, a unified storage platform designed for mid-range and high-end storage applications. Taking advantage of the replication and file sharing functions of the N8300, WSU is able to replicate data from the IBIKA, Queenstown, NMD, Potsdam and Buffalo-City primary data centres to the Buffalo-City disaster recovery site.

In addition, due to the hierarchical functionality of the N8300, a tiered storage structure of disks is used, with fibre channel (FC) disks for frequently used data and SATA for infrequently used data. This tiered storage capacity also makes the system future proof, as it accommodates future system design development.

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