Overview
The University of Calabria is one of the most important and dynamic universities in Italy, where the learning experience becomes an extraordinary opportunity in terms of human and professional development. It is the largest and most equipped University Campus in Italy. The Campus par excellence extends over a green area of over 200 hectares among the hills of the Crati Valley, in the urban area of Cosenza and Rende. Unical is an Education Campus with a broad and transversal educational offer.
Summary
- Sector: Education
Location: Calabria, Italy
The challenge
The strong innovative drive, both in technology and management methodologies, has always marked the modus operandi of the University of Calabria, so much so that it has led the University to equip itself with Cloud infrastructures. The University's underlying infrastructure consists of two platforms for the provision of virtual server services (IaaS), Software as Service (SaaS), and for the provisioning of virtual desktop services. The first is storage, which enables high-performance computing servers, interconnected over a SAN using Fiber Channel (FC) technology. The second consists of high-performance computing and storage servers interconnected over the UTP and FC Ethernet network.
The current infrastructure has the following characteristics:
- Openness to standards
- Scalability: the structure is designed to handle modern data center workloads (10Gb) FCoE but is already ready for 40 GE
- Reliability: the system is totally redundant in all its physical components (power supply, cooling, high reliability, management)
However, the current platform no longer guaranteed sufficient storage resources and reliability, in terms of business continuity, since the devices were in a single data center.
The need
They requested a solution that involves distributing the infrastructure across the two sites in active/active mode. Also important is the focus on data storage services with the most modern technological solutions, to guarantee the replication of synchronous data in the two data centers.
To achieve the objectives mentioned above, Sangfor proposed its own HCI solution, a scalable and modular platform, composed of all the features of a traditional IT infrastructure in a single device, which includes storage, processing and network resources, hypervisor, deduplication , compression, real-time data protection, optimization and business continuity. The platform includes these key elements:
- The software allows the entire organization to function using a single management portal
- Ability to perform hardware or software data deduplication and compression
Benefits offered by this solution include performance acceleration, elimination of redundant IOPS, capacity optimization, and LAN optimization by eliminating redundant data sent between the two data centers.
- The solution enables high availability without a "single point of failure".
- The solution guarantees linear scalability by simply adding new nodes in a transparent and dynamic way, raising performance and capacity standards.
- All resources can be managed from one place, globally
The project is closely linked to the updating of the ICT infrastructure and the architecture will be installed in redundancy on two separate server rooms (Primary CED and Business Continuity CED) in order to guarantee operational continuity. The required appliance must therefore offer highly reliable virtual servers and integrated storage infrastructure. The system must include virtualized and pre-configured modular blocks with powerful processing and storage capabilities and must also be able to be completely managed from a single interface and optimized to best meet the needs of heterogeneous workloads. The centralized management of computing, storage and virtual machines must also guarantee maximum "scale-out" flexibility for the management of variable workloads and the simultaneous scalability of storage and server resources. The single management interface must also include automated operational continuity control mechanisms, such as maximizing the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
In particular, the platform will consist of:
- Hyperconverged nodes for VDI services;
- Hyperconverged nodes for Cloud services;
- Software licenses necessary for the correct functioning of the CLOUD / VDI infrastructure.
The two types of nodes will be sized differently for VDI services and Cloud services.
Sangfor Solution
The proposed solution is based on hyperconverged nodes made up of the following components:
Hardware:
✓ Server Huawei FusionServer 2288H-v5 (server biprocessore 2288 v5)
✓ Switch Mellanox SN210
Software:
✓ Sangfor HCI:
aSV (Virtualizzazione server)
aSAN (virtualizzazione dello storage)
aNET (Virtualizzazione della rete)
✓ Sangfor aDesk VDI
✓ Sangfor Application Delivery
The hardware was installed in redundancy on two separate servers (Primary CED and Business Continuity CED) in order to guarantee business continuity.
