NewsCloud management

Taiwan National Open University (NOU) has adopted data center virtualization to help meet its growth targets.

Designed by Dimension Data (formerly known as Datacraft Asia), the new Vblock data center virtualization solution is expected to enable NOU to scale quickly in meeting the demands of its growing student population.

Upon evaluation of its previous IT infrastructure and projected requirements, NOU realized that its server and storage solution was unable to cope with the demands of a growing and increasingly geographically dispersed student population. It also limited the university's ability to tackle a host of IT management issues, such as optimal utilization of IT resources.

"Our IT infrastructure consisted of an ageing server and an EMC CX700 that was approaching the end of its service life," said Evan Chen, IT manager, National Open University, Taiwan.

"Both were hampering our ability to move forward with new initiatives like virtualization. As an organization that depends on the Internet to deliver many of our services, we decided to take stock of our infrastructure needs with a view to harnessing the latest virtualization technology to allow us to grow our services," Chen said.

Upon evaluation of different vendor proposals, NOU selected Dimension Data's proposal of a VCE's Vblock virtualization solution (a joint offering of VMware, Cisco and EMC), as it was considered to fit in with its objectives of network consolidation and future development. 

Dimension Data’s Vblock proposal for NOU consists of a Cisco Unified Computing System server, EMC unified storage CLARiiON and VMware vSphere platform. Consultancy services from Dimension Data rounds out the solution, which includes designing an entirely new virtual infrastructure and integrating this new architecture into the existing IT environment.

According to Frank Liao, Dimension Data Taiwan’s country general manager, the Vblock infrastructure platform combines virtualization, networking, compute, storage, security, and management technologies with end-to-end vendor accountability. The deployment of Vblock for NOU was completed in two weeks.

The Vblock platform is a joint development effort between Cisco, EMC and VMware on private cloud architectures and platforms. It includes a converged server and network platform, enterprise-class storage, and virtualization technologies.