Nexenta Serves 103,000 Students, Faculty, and Staff; Saving $9 Million in IT Operations; 3x Cheaper than Proprietary Legacy Storage Systems
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – August 4, 2015 — Nexenta (@Nexenta), the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS), today announced that the University of Toronto has realized exponential cost savings by implementing NexentaStor to support server virtualization, network storage and centralized data backup for more than 84,000 students and 19,000 staff and faculty.
“Our decision to go with Nexenta will have saved the university around $9 million over a five-year period,” said Patrick Hopewell, Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) Director. “Other storage vendors were more than 3x what we ultimately negotiated with Nexenta and yet the functionality was basically the same.”
Hopewell and his team initiated an RFP process that sought out a standard SAN solution for all enterprise services within the CIO portfolio, but wanted a solution that could also be leveraged by any department across the three campuses. Nexenta’s software-defined storage solution featuring NexentaStor was the clear choice.
“There was some initial resistance to our selection of Nexenta, but this was largely based on the reputation of legacy storage companies,” according to Hopewell. “It used to be said that no one ever got fired for going with IBM. With respect to storage, today that same expression could be applied to the major vendors. Their name recognition makes them feel like a safe bet, but there were so many benefits with Nexenta, particularly around cost, that we ultimately overcame that hesitancy.”
The university has rolled out NexentaStor with the NexentaStor HA plugin, both for the data center and for the data center’s disaster recovery solution. There are now more than a thousand virtual machines running in the data center, with around three petabytes of raw storage provisioned in Nexenta. All of this is now running on commodity hardware, which has been optimized by joint efforts between Nexenta and the university.
“Large universities epitomize today’s diverse, complex and demanding organizations,” said Tarkan Maner, Chairman and CEO of Nexenta Systems. “Everything is dispersed—data, students, staff, and the IT ecosystem. The University of Toronto chose Nexenta because our approach to SDS meant that we could not only perform at the highest levels, but their storage solution continues to be safe and agile. We’ll meet their needs today and exceed their expectations going forward.”
The University of Toronto was founded as King’s College in 1827 and has evolved into a large and complex institution that now occupies three campuses: Scarborough, Mississauga, and the historic St. George campus in downtown Toronto. The EIS team, which services all three campuses, designs, procures, implements and manages all of the enterprise-level hardware, systems and network infrastructure housed in the central administrative data center, upon which the entire university relies to deliver central IT solutions and services.
“Our relationship with Nexenta’s sales and engineering departments has been great,” added Hopewell. “We view the relationship as a two-way street: we’ve had a lot of help from Nexenta’s engineering team to help us push the envelope and deliver what we need. At the same time, we’ve done some innovative work with NexentaStor that has raised some eyebrows at Nexenta. We don’t have this kind of relationship with all of our vendors, and that’s a tribute to Nexenta’s commitment.”
Please refer to the University of Toronto Case Study for more implementation details.
Tweet This: .@UofT realizes 9 M dollar savings over five years with @Nexenta #softwaredefinedstorage solutions http://tinyurl.com/n9oc7uo #OpenSDS #SDS
About Nexenta
Nexenta is the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS) with 6,000+ customers, 400+ partners, 33 patents, and more than 1,200 petabytes of storage under management. Nexenta uniquely integrates software-only “Open Source” collaboration with commodity hardware-centric “Software-Defined Storage” innovation. Nexenta OpenSDS solutions are 100% software-based; and 100% hardware-, protocol-, and app-agnostic providing organizations with Total Freedom protecting them against punitive vendor lock-in. Nexenta provides organizations with the "true" benefits of Software-Defined Everything-centric Cloud Computing – from data centers to end users; from the infrastructure to apps. Nexenta OpenSDS enables everyday apps from rich media-driven Social Living to Mobility; from the Internet of Things to Big Data; from OpenStack and CloudStack to Do-It-Yourself Cloud deployments – for all types of Clouds – Private, Public, and Hybrid. Founded around an "Open Source” platform and industry-disrupting vision, Nexenta delivers its award- and patent-winning software-only unified storage management solutions with a global partner network, including Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, Quanta, SanDisk, Seagate, Supermicro, VMware, Western Digital, Wipro, and many others.
For more information, visit, www.nexenta.com, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Also, download the newly published Nexenta Special Edition Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) for Dummies eBook.
Nexenta, NexentaStor, NexentaConnect, NexentaEdge and NexentaFusion are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nexenta Systems Inc., in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks and company names mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners.
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Company Contact:
Allison Darin
Nexenta
831-359-8208
pr@nexenta.com
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