University of Milan selects Syneto to deliver VDI and Private Cloud unified storage

The University of Milan is one of Europe’s leading universities and, with a student body of approximately 65,000 spread across nine schools, it is also one of the continent’s largest public teaching and research institutions. Its Information Systems Division team is responsible for the maintenance, security and smooth running of all the universities’ IT systems including all data storage infrastructure. Prior to starting the tender process the IT team agreed on two overarching priorities: to create a private cloud to consolidate and safeguard the university’s data, and to introduce a VDI solution that would boost efficiency and reduce the time needed for administration and maintenance of the datacentre.

The Information Systems Division team was concerned by the fact that students and university staff alike were storing files on a wide range of unmanageable and potentially insecure public clouds. The team required a 24/7 solution that would see its original data (such as research) brought into one private cloud so that it could be directly stored and protected. Key considerations were cost, efficiency and flexibility.

Dr Luisa Ferrario, Information Systems Division Associate Manager at the University of Milan, said: “We were not just looking at the initial outlay but the total cost of ownership and it was clear that Syneto’s easy-to-use and manage arrays would satisfy our technological and business requirements well. The offering of in-line compression, deduplication, VMware integration, a revolutionary filing system with self-healing capabilities, and very strong data protection features, was very compelling for us. Furthermore, Syneto has a dedicated and highly proactive support team who is able to help us overcome any related challenges at any time of the day. To us this is invaluable.”

Syneto’s ARK Series also fully met the demands placed on the University’s IT team, as it smoothly integrated with the existingUnimiBox software developed in-house by the university and provided a reliable and secure cloud infrastructure which can be scaled up to 100TB. The technology has allowed Dr Ferrario’s team to put in place a solid disaster recovery strategy by scheduling and carrying out regular snapshots of all the university’s data. Syneto’s ARK Series contains a smart file system, which has also helped the team to prevent silent data corruption such as errors that occur during writing, reading, storage, transmission, or processing of stored data.

The university’s IT team was keen to replace its legacy workstations with a VDI infrastructure that would bolster efficiency while reducing cost and manpower, the latter already shrinking in the face of smaller budgets. This called for a solution that could autonomously and quickly deliver the required storage capacity without costly over-provisioning. During the proof of concept the Syneto Extreme all-flash array delivered 250,000 IOPS.

“The Syneto Extreme storage arrays are exactly what we needed. They can easily reach the hundreds of thousands of IOPS we require and, because they are so easy to integrate and manage, the total cost of ownership is significantly lower than it’d be with competing alternatives,” continued Dr Ferrario.

“The University of Milan project perfectly demonstrates the breadth of challenges Syneto provides solutions to. In this case the IT administrator needed a solution that would guarantee the consolidation, protection and management of the organisation’s data. We were able to deliver a private cloud and VDI solution that can easily cope with spikes in data usage, require low level of maintenance, are flexible, and ultimately, delivers a much lower TCO than anything else on the market,” said Vadim Comanescu, COO at Syneto