The challenge

The University of Auckland is New Zealand’s largest university, hosting over 40,000 students across five Auckland campuses. The University of Auckland’s IT System Services (ITSS) sits within the University’s Auckland city campus and manages the strategy, applications, infrastructure and networking environments that support the university’s enterprise IT services.

In 2005, ITSS’ IT environment consisted of an increasingly complex mixture of server platforms, hardware, operating systems and applications. Intel servers existed in large numbers, increasing the complexity of managing the environment in a controlled manner.

The number of servers was also contributing to increased costs for data centre power consumption, temperature conditioning and floor space. Furthermore, fluctuations in IT demand meant that the average use of the Intel servers was only at 15 to 20 percent.

In June 2005, ITSS looked for a partner to achieve: increased server efficiency, faster delivery times for new applications, reduced total cost of ownership, effective use of resources, improved disaster recovery abilities, and simplified operational management. ITSS also needed a flexible solution with the ability to scale for future business growth.

ITSS identified virtualisation technologies as key to achieving their objectives – using fewer but substantially larger servers to host a number of applications. In what is possibly the largest and most ambitious server virtualisation and consolidation project to date in New Zealand, ITSS worked with chosen supplier Gen-i in virtualising 230 servers and consolidating them onto 11 large IBM servers connecting to a virtualised SAN environment.

Throughout the project Gen-i worked with ITSS to manage the consolidation process, with Gen-i taking a lead coordinating role in planning, designing and piloting the new server environment. Gen-i also worked with ITSS to provide a framework for the architecture, methodology and management of the migration to the virtual environment including security, network loads and the changing storage landscape. A steering group consisting of ITSS and Gen-i stakeholders provided guidance and governance throughout the project to ensure risks were identified and addressed early on.

To date the project has been a huge success with server efficiency increasing to a minimum of 60 percent. All the objectives of the original business case have been met and in some cases, exceeded. Virtualisation and server consolidation has enabled the university to reduce not only project operating costs but also the total cost of ownership through better use of resources, service time savings, reduced operating costs and time saved through ease of deployment. Through virtualisation the University can rapidly deploy new servers in minutes, not hours, and it has also enhanced its disaster recovery abilities.