Colleges Struggle to Keep Up With Data Demands

Computerworld - Exploding data growth on college campuses, driven by rich media, virtual classrooms and mushrooming e-mail files, is forcing IT managers to find ways to quickly boost storage capacity.

IT managers at the University of North Texas in Denton were surprised by the rapid growth of e-mail files when they started replacing Novell Inc.s GroupWise software with Microsoft Corp.s Exchange in February, said Dave Gerlach, computer systems manager for the colleges Computing & Information Technology Center.

IT managers had expected that the 6,500 Exchange e-mail boxes would require 3.5TB of storage capacity, up from 700GB needed for the older system, Gerlach said. Then we get there and we [need] 7.6TB, which just blew me away, he said.

Factoring in extra storage needed for fail-over, storage administrators finally determined that the e-mail project would ultimately require 15.2TB of capacity, Gerlach said. The school began a gradual implementation of the Exchange e-mail system earlier this month.

Much of the added e-mail storage needs can be traced to ever-larger attachments, which include video and MP3 files and PowerPoint presentations, Gerlach said.

To meet those and other storage demands, the school replaced its Hitachi Lightning 9960 and EMC Clariion CX 600 systems with four arrays from Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Compellent Technologies Inc.

The new arrays provide a storage capacity of 142TB, including 22.5TB for e-mail, Gerlach noted. Data is exploding, and were trying to keep up, he said.

He estimated the cost of the new storage systems at about $8,400 per terabyte.

In addition to e-mail, a growing Oracle database and increased use of Web­CT classroom applications from Washington-based Blackboard Inc. are necessitating more storage capacity, he said. People want more classrooms available online, and more students are enrolling, so the classroom gets larger, Gerlach said. In addition, he noted that most professors want their online classes to be stored indefinitely.

Overall, Gerlachs group manages roughly 300 servers and the university network, he said. The IT operation is responsible for performing schoolwide backups through a subscription and chargeback model.

Doug Chandler, an analyst at market research firm IDC, said college IT departments are under increasing pressure to spruce up data management and storage capacities as selling points to an emerging breed of students who have high-end technology experience and expectations.

Its a lot different now than we were talking about six or seven years ago, [with] larger files, videos and graphics-oriented files, said Chandler. He added that the amount of data now stored by students is astounding. Jerry Waldron, CIO at Salisbury University in Maryland, said his school is experiencing annual data growth of 15% to 20%. The universitys storage systems currently hold about 15TB of data.