Eastern Michigan Univ. Chooses EMC Celerra and Avamar De-Dupe

EMC Corporation announced that Eastern Michigan University has turned to EMC storage solutions to improve the management and protection of the important information in the University’s data center operations. By leveraging EMC Avamar deduplication backup software and EMC Celerra unified storage, the University has been able to save money, time and resources by reducing backup windows, meeting service level agreements and consolidating storage systems.

With 22,000-plus students, administration and faculty, the amount of information the University generated over the past few years has exploded, creating challenges for their centralized IT data center. It was becoming ever more cumbersome to complete daily backups and protect the University’s mission critical applications, including Banner, Microsoft SQL Server, network attached storage (NAS) file systems and Business Objects, using the University’s legacy data backup systems.

Lynnette Rose, Associate Director, Enterprise Operations at Eastern Michigan University, said: "At times, backing up a NAS file system would take four days, if it completely backed the information at all. In addition, we would have to allocate large segments of our existing storage area network to improve our backup process. This, combined with our processes around backing up information, made it close to impossible to reach our service level agreements on being able to restore the information."

Working with EMC Velocity partner AdvizeX Technologies, LLC, the University evaluated a number of solutions to streamline and consolidate its storage infrastructure and backup operations. With the help of AdvizeX, the University chose to deploy EMC Avamar deduplication backup software and EMC Celerra unified storage systems. Using Avamar, the University’s entire backup window was reduced from days down to only 4 to 5 hours, with most backups taking just a few minutes.

To add additional layers of management, the University recently deployed a VMware virtual infrastructure to streamline and consolidate a portion of its server environment. The University is now seeing tangible benefits of deduplicating and backing up their IT infrastructure running in a VMware environment. Avamar scans the virtual machines in use, detects the changes at the sub-file level and only backs up the segments that have changed. Due to this level of management and granularity in deduplicating redundant data, the University has felt more comfortable in expanding their virtual environment.

Rose added: "EMC Avamar has enabled us to think differently about our environment – particularly being proactive about our data protection and management of both our physical and virtual infrastructure. Now, most backups – whether they are databases or file systems – take just minutes to complete because the change-rate on most of our applications is less than one percent. With our VMware environment, Avamar has also made it extremely easy to manage and protect our virtual machines. This has enabled us to reduce the demand on the network and recover disk space previously used solely for backup. We now have the utmost confidence in a scalable data protection architecture that can grow as quickly as the data growth occurring on campus."

In addition, the University consolidated a number of old storage systems onto an EMC Celerra NS-80 to provide greater flexibility to allocate and provision storage on the fly to where ever it was needed within the University campus. Rose said: "The robust functionality and performance of EMC Celerra gave us the ability to step back and re-evaluate our infrastructure architecture. As a result, we were able to reduce power consumption costs, improve cooling demand and shrink our overall footprint in the data center."