Deakin University gets Cisco UCS

Dimension Data has commenced a quarter million dollar Cisco deployment to virtualise Deakin University's data centre resources.

The deal was part of a server refresh project that built on a long-standing relationship between the service provider, university, and vendor.

Deakin sought an environmentally friendly system that would streamline its resources and rapidly deliver around 300 software applications in an agile manner. The system supported an estimated 34,000 students and 2,600 academic and administrative staff.

According to the university's IT division director Peter Brusco, Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) was chosen "because it enables a whole lot of advantages".

By providing a single point of management for server, network and storage access, UCS was expected to lower the cost of IT infrastructure, deployment and management, allowing IT staff to focus on business-critical issues.

Orders for the UCS were placed in mid-November. It was delivered last month, was expected to be operational by mid-June and in full production by October.

It was to be deployed at Deakin's main campuses in Burwood and Geelong, Victoria, and would integrate the university's Cisco Ironport applications, Borderless Network architecture, and Unified Wireless solutions.

The network also was designed to support a portfolio of communication solutions including the latest IP PABX version of Cisco's Unified Wired and Wireless IP Phones as a virtualised workload.

Dimension Data was one of the first channel partners to achieve Cisco's UCS Authorised Technology Provider (ATP) status after the product was launched last March.

The company's enterprise architect Jon Farrell told CRN that market interest in UCS was strong, mentioning CEnet and Deakin University as recent clients.

"We have seen considerable client uptake and interest over the last quarter particularly across education, government and corporate sectors," he said.

"Based on feedback from ... a recent national roadshow we ran on virtualisation, organisations have moved from asking 'what is UCS' to 'what's the solution'-- which we can demonstrate across the key areas of infrastructure consolidation, virtualisation and operational automation."

"Case studies such as CEnet and Deakin University demonstrate production solutions, so there's growing confidence with it as a compute platform," he told CRN.

Farrell said a "number of vendors" were emerging with UCS competitors, although he did not name the vendors or products.

Following the UCS deployment, Deakin planned to upgrade to VMWare vSphere 4, and migrate its Oracle databases into the new environment to enable multiple instances and full redundancy.

Brusco expected the system to support "everything that doesn't get moved to the cloud" and reduce complexity.

"In the short term, this shouldn't impact staffing at all, but it avoids us having to recruit more stuff in future if it becomes more complex everyday," he told CRN.