Case Study
University of Würzburg
brings scalability to its
Objective
Installing a flexible, scalable server and
storage infrastructure that could store
and archive fast-growing data volumes
quickly, securely and reliably
Approach
Extensive consultation and workshops
with HPE and its partner Bechtle
IT Matters
• Having a highly automated solution
from a single provider relieves strain
on the IT administrators
• Fast overnight backup creation
using LTO-6 tape drives
• Expanding the solution is fast,
flexible and cost-eective
Business Matters
• High stability and availability of the
entire storage and server environment
for teaching and research
• The solution puts the University in an
excellent position to be able to cope
with ever-increasing data volumes and
future applications
• There is one, single point of contact
in the event of an issue as the entire
solution is provided by HPE
data centre
Integrated HPE server and storage solution
manages increasing data volumes
When dramatic increases
in data volumes began to
push the existing storage
and server infrastructure
to its limits, the team
decided to look for a
modern, flexible and
scalable replacement.
They found it in an
integrated solution from
HPE comprising two
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
7400 systems and two
HPE StoreEver ESL G3 tape
libraries with LTO-6 tapes.
Challenge
Increasing data volumes create
capacity bottlenecks
The University of Würzburg’s data
centre is its central IT service provider.
Its 50 employees provide IT services
including system operation, network and
communication, consultation, information,
training and multimedia services, to the
University’s 28,000 students and 4,000
research and teaching sta across its
various faculties and institutes. Founded
over 600 years ago, the University oers
courses across a wide range of subjects.
Accompanying its traditional fields of
medicine, theology, philosophy and law
are now a number of new areas of study,
including nanostructure technology,
functional materials, biomedicine, digital
humanities, media communication and
human-computer systems.
Case study
University of
Würzburg
“With the two HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 and HPE StoreEver ESL G3 tape
libraries with LTO-6 tapes, we now have a large enough buer to be able
to cope with the increasing data volumes our faculties will generate over
the next few years.”
– Dr. Matthias Reichling, deputy data centre manager and centralised and decentralised services manager,
Industry
Education
University of Würzburg
Page 2
The data centre works closely with a number
of external IT service providers. Each user at
the University is assigned their own central
directory. The data they store is always
backed up and they have the option to
archive their data if they need to.
The data centre currently operates some
40 standalone servers and 48 blades
(Linux, OES, Windows® Server and ESXi
clusters), multiple VMware ESXi clusters
for over 300 virtual servers – running
entirely on HPE blade technology – and
around 300 virtual desktops. The entire data
centre infrastructure has long been based
on a complete Hewlett Packard Enterprise
solution comprising servers, storage and
network components. “We’ve always had
excellent experiences with HPE hardware
and fantastic service from its partner
Bechtle. The environment is highly available
and very stable,” says Dr. Matthias Reichling,
deputy data centre manager and centralised
and decentralised services manager at the
University of Würzburg. “So we were very
happy that we were able to continue working
with both of them when it came time to
replace our existing IT infrastructure, which
was bursting at the seams. The presales
advisors have also got to know us well over
the years and always provide fast answers to
our queries.”
The existing storage environment –
comprising two HPE EVA storage arrays
and two HPE ESL 712 LTO-4 tape libraries
housed in two separate data centre rooms
– had finally reached its limits. There was
300 TB of data in the storage area network
(SAN). “Over the past ten years, our data
volumes have increased by a factor of 12.
And we’re expecting it to grow even more
in the coming years,” says Reichling.
“We can’t tell exactly how much as it
depends on the projects our faculties
have planned – and we often have no
idea when they’re coming.”
Many faculties are using applications
that are beginning to generate larger and
larger volumes of data. “The resolutions of
the cameras, microscope and measuring
devices that many of our faculties use have
increased dramatically in recent years,”
continues Reichling. Histological tissue
samples, for example, easily generate images
of 100,000 x 100,000 pixels. And as they are
often in colour, file sizes can be anything up
to 30 GB or more. Experts predict that data
volumes produced by imaging software will
approximately double every three years.
Case study
University of
Würzburg
Industry
Education
Page 3
Solution
A complete HPE server and
storage solution
“We need an IT infrastructure that allows
us to react very flexibly to a wide variety of
applications,” explains Reichling. Which is
why the University consulted Bechtle and
HPE, took part in workshops with them
and even visited the HPE Lab in Böblingen
before finally deciding on a scalable,
integrated HPE solution consisting of
storage devices, servers and Fibre Channel
network components. The new setup
comprises two HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400
storage systems, two HPE StoreEasy 3000
Gateway Storage devices and two HPE
BladeSystem c7000 housings with 36 HPE
ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 blade servers.
Backups are created using two HPE ProLiant
DL380 Gen9 servers. Existing backup tapes
have been migrated to two HPE StoreEver
ESL G3 tape libraries with LTO-6 tape drives
and media.
The archive server is used for long-term
storage of large data volumes. The user
must actively trigger the data to be archived
themselves, for example when they finish
their research projects. The Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft requires primary
data to be archived for ten years.
Users can also store their data on fast disk
drives. Backup servers take regular copies
of the data, and the institutes’ servers can
also be backed up if required. Archive and
backup servers write the data to the two
HPE ESL G3 tape libraries which are housed
in machine rooms in dierent buildings. “This
dramatically increases our data security in
the event of a disaster as the two rooms are
over 700 metres apart,” says Reichling.
Benefits
Flexibly scalable for every research
and teaching application
The two HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 devices
currently have a data capacity of 800 TB,
but can be expanded by adding additional
drives at any time. “This means that we
have a large enough buer to be able to
cope with the increasing data volumes our
faculties will generate over the next few
years,” says Reichling, confidently. Much
of the data is mirrored between the two
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 devices using
the HPE 3PAR Replication Suite software
to ensure high availability. Reichling:
“We decided not to mirror mass data for
cost reasons, but all of our other data is
duplicated on tapes.”
At the University, large data volumes are
mainly generated by automated applications
using measurement devices or cameras.
“Our new, modern architecture means we
are now able to cope with applications like
this. We even have enough of a buer in
both the SAN and tape libraries for the next
two to three years, but we can add additional
capacity flexibly and cost-eectively if
we need to. This is very reassuring for us,”
says Reichling. While the amount of space
in the old tape library was limited to 698
slots per frame, the University of Würzburg
data centre now has four frames with 1,500
slots, which can easily be expanded to up
to 12,000.
Case study
University of
Würzburg
Industry
Education
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• 2 x HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400
• 2 x HPE StoreEasy 3000
Gateway Storage
• 2 x HPE BladeSystem c7000
• 36 x HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8
• 2 x HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 servers
• 2 x HPE StoreEver ESL G3 tape
libraries with LTO-6
• HPE StoreFabric SAN infrastructure
Our solution partners
“Whether we’ll actually ever need 12,000
slots, I don’t know. But it was important
for us to have the ability to expand the
HPE StoreEver ESL G3 tape libraries over
the coming years should we need to,”
explains Reichling. Dr. Reichling never
wants to have to remove second copies
from the library again just to be able to
cope with the backup data volumes, as
he had to do in the final months before
the new solution was installed.
The HPE StoreEver ESL G3 oers a
combination of scalable capacity, high
availability and reliability, simple yet eective
management technology and enterprise
level security so that companies can meet
data security and long-term archiving
requirements. It can be scaled up to a
capacity of 75 PB and is therefore ideal
for use in large storage environments.
The Capacity on Demand option enables
operators to expand their systems flexibly
and without interruption, and also makes it
easier to manage storage environments that
are constantly growing. The HPE ESL G3
software minimises risk and increases ROI
and productivity by monitoring the status
of the entire tape storage environment
proactively and reliably. The HPE ESL G3
provides high availability by using redundant
network components and a dual system
which uses automatic path failover in the
host systems to ensure the tape systems
perform as eectively as possible. Security
features such as access controls and
FIPS-compliant data encryption are key
data management functions, both when
writing data to the tapes and after they
have been exported.
Higher data volumes faster with LTO-6
Another positive factor for the data centre
is that the data volumes and speeds of the
LTO-6 tapes are far above those of the
previous LTO-4 tapes: “You can really tell
how much better the data is compressed
– it’s actually improved by a factor of 3.9,”
says Reichling. “And as they are faster, we
no longer have bottlenecks being created
overnight as sometimes used to happen
when parallel backup jobs were competing
with restore jobs.
“The IT administrators are also very happy
that they no longer really have to manage
the tape libraries. Once configured, they
work perfectly – writing the data to the
tapes each night. Restoring data from the
tapes is also now a fast and reliable process,”
praises Reichling.
Managing the data centre’s storage and
server environment is now much easier than
it was before. Reichling: “And if something
does go wrong, we only have to contact one
manufacturer as everything is from HPE.
HPE and Bechtle resolve any problems
we have quickly and professionally.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/storage
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4AA6-3663EEW, January 2016
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