University of Central Florida

University of Central Florida Speeds Through Its Fall Semester Registration with Sun Solution

With 223 degree programs, the University of Central Florida (UCF) has become an academic and research leader in a variety of fields, including optics, modeling and simulation, engineering and computer science, business administration, education, hospitality management, and digital media. More than 5,000 faculty and staff serve approximately 43,000 undergraduate and 7,000 graduate students on UCF’s main campus near Orlando and 11 regional campuses located throughout central Florida.

Customer Challenges

Implement a highly scalable and reliable storage area network (SAN)
Increase computing power for back-end database systems
Improve efficiency and cost effectiveness of application servers
Deploy more cost-effective storage for the university’s disaster-recovery environment

Solution

To increase throughput and storage capacity, UCF deployed a Sun StorageTek 9990V System as the centerpiece of a high-performance SAN. Replacing 12 Dell machines with three Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers and refreshing 10 legacy Sun machines with faster, more-efficient Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 servers also boosted performance and saved on power and cooling requirements.

Business Results

Improved overall system performance by up to a factor of 10
Increased the reliability and uptime of the university’s SAN
Implemented cost-effective storage that will scale with ongoing growth
Reduced power consumption and heat dissipation
Decreased operational costs
Implemented the solution in a tight four-week time frame

Products and Services

Story Details

The University of Central Florida (UCF) offers more than 200 degree programs to nearly 50,000 students. For more than 10 years, UCF has relied on Sun servers, storage, software, and services to support the IT systems that make it possible for such a large university to operate efficiently.

Specifically, UCF maintains a platform that includes PeopleSoft 8.9 supported by an Oracle 10g database, all running on Sun hardware and the Solaris 10 Operating System. This platform powers critical applications ranging from student administration and records management to Web portals and enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality.

" The Sun StorageTek 9990V system is very reliable and we are very happy with it. The system offers a fully redundant design with much improved performance and features to support our IT needs. "

— Robert Yanckello, Chief Technology Officer, University of Central Florida

In 2007, the university sought to increase the capacity and scalability of its Oracle/PeopleSoft platform to meet growing computational and storage demands. This would require a high-performance storage area network (SAN) and related system upgrades. UCF also wanted any new systems to be in place in time for the Fall 2008 semester to facilitate student registration and class scheduling.

In November 2007, after reviewing competing proposals from major storage vendors, UCF chose the Sun StorageTek 9990V system with 21 TB of raw capacity and running BOS V and Sun StorageTek 9900 ShadowImage In-System Replication Software. This system would serve as the centerpiece of its high-performance SAN, replacing an older StorageTek SAN system. UCF selected Sun after concluding the StorageTek 9990V system was “best of breed” in its product class for both performance and especially reliability. UCF’s decision was also based on Sun’s history of providing the university with high-quality, responsive, and expert service.

Data from the StorageTek 9990V system is backed up onto an existing 330-slot Sun StorageTek SL500 modular library system. To increase capacity, UCF added two Sun StorageTek LTO 3 drives to the StorageTek SL500 tape library, complementing its eight existing LTO 2 drives. This SAN is connected by two 128-port Brocade 48000 Director switches. To further support the university’s disaster recovery strategy, UCF selected three Sun StorageTek 2540 SAS arrays with a total capacity of 21 TB and managed by Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager software. A Sun Fire V490 system acts as the master server for Symantec Veritas NetBackup 6.5 software, and two additional V490 systems serve as media servers.

To increase the computational capacity of its existing Sun Fire E20K database server, UCF purchased two Sun USBRDT 5240 Uniboards. The E20K server is partitioned to support the University's campus, portal, financial, and CRM solutions.

For its PeopleSoft application servers, UCF replaced 10 Sun Fire V880 and V890 servers with eight faster, more efficient Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 servers, each with an eight-core UltraSPARC T2 processor, and with five Sun Fire T2000 servers. “We really like the T5220 class of machine,” says Robert Yanckello, chief technology officer at the University of Central Florida. “It has proven to be very reliable and successful for us here.” For other virtualized applications running on VMware, UCF replaced 12 physical Dell servers with three Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers, each with four quad-core processors. Implementing the Sun T5220 and X4600 M2 servers has helped the University to reduce power consumption and heat dissipation within its datacenter.

The new Sun hardware is backed by a SunSpectrum Platinum Service Plan, and the solution included a custom package of Sun Professional Services to help with planning and deployment as well as Sun training on the new StorageTek 9990V system. Based on the success of the project, the university is planning to add another 10 TB of capacity to the StorageTek 9990V system and is considering purchasing additional software in the Sun StorageTek 9900 Software Suite.

UCF is pleased with the fast operation and high reliability that the new solution offers, with up to a 10-fold improvement in overall performance. Yanckello says, “Even during the peak loads of the semester’s first week, when many students are adding and dropping classes, everything moved smoothly. We had great performance and no downtime.” He also adds, “The systems are simple to manage and use, and Sun has been easy to do business with.”