Making virtualization mainstream, and enabling virtualization to use with familiar tools has enabled Brown University’s IT team to reduce hardware costs and greatly improve data protection at the organizational level. Nancy Magers, Associate Director, disaster recovery and storage services, Brown University, explained this successful collaboration to theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, at the just concluded EMC World 2014.

Explaining the advantage of virtualization, Magers said the rise of virtualization and cloud computing technology brings with it enormous opportunities to increase Information Technology agility and flexibility while reducing the cost and complexity of an organization’s network infrastructure.

Unlike many other universities, Brown University’s legacy and modern requirements put a great deal of demand on their aging data centers and tape storage services. In order to deal with these issues, the University needed to rebuild their data centers with business continuity and data recovery built-in. She said Brown University has gone to 100 percent virtualization by adopting 70 percent VMware and remaining 30 percent as ESX virtualization technologies.

Data protection at every level

Vellante then asked how the university is protecting their data. To that end, Magers said, “We have lots of different level of protection. On our high priority applications, we do data replication directly at databases level using EMC products.” She added that the university recently implemented EMC Isilon and are doing data replication on Isilon environment.

“We also have EMC Networker environment and nightly backup environment, and we use EMC Networker with VMware ViDP combined to protect our VMware environement” she said. “In addition to live replication of our databases, we do nightly SQL dump backup, and they are done directly to data domains supporting SQL,” she added.

Re-thinking to change IT services

Responding to the question of how the IT department is changing its approach corresponding to the boom in social, and mobile media, Magers said IT department is constantly changing the policies to meet the demand of their staff and students.

“Staff are also teaching students Internet of Things and its really engaging the students,” she added.

When asked what is the delivery platform used in the university, she said email is our official means of communication.

Isilon is the next big thing

Magers said that the data domain provides the visibility to DBAs and storage admins in terms of data backup, data replication etc. The use of de-duplication provides them good performance, network speed and faster processing of data. This also increases the productivity of the DBAs. DBAs now have their full catalog of backups accessible for them from any system.

Magers concluded the interview stating that we are currently experiencing a big shift in backup solution for future needs in replying to the question of what next in pipeline for the university. She said Isilon is the next big thing right now and they are implementing Isilon for the campus to process unstructured data. It has the potential of scalability, simplicity, de-duplication, performance, and everything you want in a file system.