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University of Petroleum and Energy Studies deployed Dell storage coupled with VMware virtualization solution in order to realize its scalability and cloud ambitions By Mehak Chawla
The University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) started in the year 2003 with just 234 students on its roll. However, when this number spiked beyond 5500, the university was quick to realize that it needs not only technology, but scalable and efficient technology in order to live up to the changing needs of students as well as the organization. That is how virtualization came into the picture.
That UPES was a technology savvy university right from inception was something that surely helped it in reaching this decision.
“We realized early that technology is a big enabler in higher education. We had a completely wireless campus back in 2003, when the concept was really nascent, so we have been early adopters of technology in the education vertical,” elaborates Ashish Bharadwaj, CIO, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies.
UPES’s technology savvy roots are demonstrated by the fact that the university already has a thin client architecture from erstwhile Sun Microsystems (which was acquired by Oracle in 2010) and they are running SAP’s Student Lifecycle Management (SLM) software to manage their back-end as well as front end activities.
UPES’s virtualization journey began back in 2007 when they started virtualizing their servers. The virtualization of other infrastructure also took off gradually from there. It was only last year that the university decided to expand their virtualization project by virtualizing their storage.
The need to virtualize
“We started our virtualization journey in 2007 and initially the focus was to increase the utilization of existing infrastructure and thus save on capex and opex, both from procurement as well as management perspective,” explains Bharadwaj. In the following years, the university extended their virtualization ambitions to network, desktops and most recently, storage. “As of now 99% of our infrastructure is virtualized. It includes servers, storage, networks and desktops,” claims Bharadwaj.
Bharadwaj agrees that for most part, their virtualization ambitions were fueled by their desire to be on the cloud platform. UPES is already using Amazon’s public cloud for their Center for Continuing Education (CCE) from which they are running some apps including their SLM . Apart from Amazon, the university also has an internal private cloud. “We went onto our private cloud completely this year after we changed our entire storage infrastructure during the last year,” mentions Bharadwaj.
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The decision to virtualize storage, according to Bharadwaj, was made not only keeping in background the eventual move to private cloud, but also the rocketing storage needs of the organization. With more than 50 courses and several e-learning modules on offer, the university was feeling compelled to evaluate more scalable storage options.
As a result, UPES opted for two boxes of Dell Equalogic IP SAN storage with VMware virtualization solution, which they are now running at both their locations- the corporate office in Delhi and the campus in Dehradun. “We are managing 12 TB of storage at each location and thus, 24 TB in totality,” elaborates Bharadwaj.
This storage virtualization, coupled with server virtualization that the organization undertook earlier, has significantly reduced the load on their IT infrastructure. According to Bharadwaj, UPES now has about 17 physical servers and 58 virtual servers running on these 17.
Bharadwaj adds, “The essential thing was that we virtulized all our existing hosts which were about 1500 under peak loads. With storage virtualization we have tripled our storage capacity in the sense that we can add 3 times the number of machines on the same storage box. We also have the required scalability and can easily scale up from the existing 12 TB in a matter of minutes.”
Challenges en route
According to Bharadwaj, the biggest challenge they faced during this virtualization process was lack of experience because, “Being early movers in this space, we did not have many case studies to learn from. We had to learn from our own experience.”
One big technical challenge that UPES faced was pertaining to the migration of machines with as limited downtime as possible. “In the initial stages, machine migration, especially converting Solaris machines to VMs was a big challenge,” confirms Bharadwaj.
Nitin Phadnis, National Manager, Server Solutions Marketing, Dell India corroborates, “Downtime has been a challenge, hence process was slow and tedious. Further, continuity of existing services was a huge challenge.”
According to Bharadwaj, a thing that worked in their favor was that VMware, over the years, has significantly advanced its portfolio. “Earlier, we never used to have stuff like vMotion etc and we had to use external tools to do things like image based backups which is now a part of VMware’s offerings. But since these third party tools were not a part of their VMware’s offerings, it was a challenge to integrate them seamlessly. Chances of glitches were also higher. With increased offerings from VMware, transparent load balancing can happen and some other problems too have been sorted.”
Customization was also an issue that came up during the project. “The need and challenges of each customer who goes for virtualization are different and so was case with UPES. Hence, customization in implementation process was imperative. However, this customization was as per priorities of UPES and was limited to controlled rolling out of options and benefits of virtualization,” sums up Phadnis.
Mapping returns
As is the end result of most virtualization projects, UPES has also been able to significantly reduce their infrastructure acquisition costs by the virtue of virtualization. The infrastructure utilization too, has gone up. “Earlier our average utilization was about 15-24% for each of our critical servers. We have been able to take that to about 60-80% depending on the load. Now we can do transparent load balancing and allocation of resources,” observes Bharadwaj.
Through this project UPES has also managed to shorten the time taken for provisioning of resources. Earlier, deployment of a new server or apps could take weeks or even months. UPES can now provision resources in a matter of minutes.
Virtualizing the storage has also resulted in significant improvement of back up and disaster recovery processes for the university. Bharadwaj adds that scalability issues have also been sorted, “Scalability has two aspects- increasing the number of boxes analyzing the requirements springing in the near future and increasing the capacity of the existing boxes. Both aspects have become fairly simple with Dell’s solution. We don’t see any issue arising on the scalability front in the coming 3-5 years.”
While the benefits of storage virtualization are yet to reflect completely on the business side, Bharadwaj believes that this project, coupled with their cloud deployment, will go a long way in stabilizing the institution’s IT infrastructure.
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