Program Summary. Criterion 1: Importance to University Mission / Operations. Importance to Mission

Transcription

1 Program Summary DoIT provides NIU's storage infrastructure for users, departments, and applications and provides multiple forms of data protection. This program includes: Microsoft s OneDrive offering to faculty, staff and students with 10TB of secure cloud storage that meets the compliance standards for personal health information (HIPAA), student data (FERPA), credit- card processing (PCI), and law enforcement data (CJIS). AnywhereFiles with access to a 5GB shared drive for faculty, staff and students. Network Attached Storage (NAS) for departments who don't require more- expensive locally- attached drives. High- performance server storage for enterprise applications. NIU should mandate a centrally- managed storage offering. Approximately 70% of NIU file storage is housed on departmentally- owned Netware servers that have lost vendor support as of December Criterion 1: Importance to University Mission / Operations Importance to Mission This program supplies the storage foundation for all enterprise- class applications, including Blackboard, and the high- performance computing cluster for academic researchers. A great deal of academic research is funded by grants and grant proposals require data plans. Good plans not only help get grants but also help to disseminate the research widely. An infrastructure that can be referenced in the plan and then managed by storage experts allows researchers and their graduate assistants to work on the subject of the grant rather than performing IT functions. This program also provides storage for regional entities, strengthening community bonds and outreach while allowing for larger purchases that lower the unit cost for NIU. Importance to Operations Every university runs on technology and this technology has three primary components: a network, some place to store the data, and somewhere to run the applications. DoIT s storage infrastructure stores NIU s enterprise data and to do without this environment is to double down on paper as a storage medium. Badly in need of upgrading, DoIT has recommended and is awaiting funding for a new storage environment that would: 1. provide a low- cost storage solution for the entire campus, comparable to any cloud- based vendor; 2. provide four data protection options to give campus units appropriate choices in a cost/benefit analysis; 3. free local IT staff from managing scalable commodity infrastructure and allow them to support department- specific technology needs; and 4. free up capacity on the high- cost and high- performing storage and data protection infrastructure used to support NIU s data centers and enterprise systems such as PeopleSoft, Blackboard and OnBase. These operational efficiencies can only be properly leveraged by centralizing and consolidating the variety of storage options across campus into DoIT s secure and less expensive centralized storage environment. Program Portfolio While a robust and secure storage infrastructure cannot guarantee academic excellence, it does provide the foundation for any university s teaching and learning environment. Without secure, highly- available and protected December 12,

2 data, faculty and students would no longer have the anywhere, any- time access to the course materials and online collaboration tools that are now the expected features of any 21 st - century university. Program Synergy DoIT s storage infrastructure is available for any unit on campus to use. Data protection and backup options exist to service a full range of requirements at the best cost/benefit ratio for each use case. This program is dependent on DoIT s Network Architecture and Support program to provide a stable data transfer environment and enhances the offerings of both the Server Hosting/Administration and the High Performance Computing Support program. Criterion 2: Quality / Effectiveness Functions and Services DoIT provides multiple storage options for secure cost- effective storage, as well as archives and backups to meet group and individual data requirements. These solutions are available for primary, shared, archival and backup data and can be customized for security and availability requirements. Options include: AnywhereFiles with 5GB of individual file space for faculty, staff and students; backups centrally- managed and routinely performed; high- performance server storage; shared drives and folders; individual, cloud- based storage via Microsoft's OneDrive for Business with 10TB of cloud storage and a 10GB maximum file size; secured storage compliant with FERPA, HIPAA and PCI requirements; access from web browsers, mobile devices or Microsoft Office desktop applications. Earlier this year DoIT met with 23 departments to assess needs and requirements and most are eager to move to a consolidated service with a rational cost model. Departments with significant non- DoIT managed storage are candidates for consolidation. These include the Library, Geography and the Broadcast Center. Several external entities have expressed strong interest in buying storage. The increased quantities will allow DoIT to purchase enough to benefit from volume discounts and lower the unit cost for the NIU community. Measures of Quality 1. System availability: planned and unplanned downtime. 2. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): amount of time taken to restore needed data. 3. Recovery Point Objective (RPO): point in time that data is restored to. Evidence of Quality 1. DoIT manages multiple storage arrays and has not had an unplanned outage in more than three years. Required maintenance is performed at 5:00AM on Sundays to minimally impact users, but has not been calculated as part of an overall system availability percentage. This will be corrected in DoIT s guaranteed time to restore data is the end of the business day following the restore request. DoIT consistently exceeds the industry benchmark of a 95% success rate. December 12,

3 3. DoIT s guaranteed maximum data loss due to catastrophic failure is the previous night s backup, meaning the restored data will be no more than a day old. In the last three years, DoIT has been 100% successful in restoring requested files and directories within this RPO objective. Quality Improvement DoIT has completed the first phase of a project with distributed IT staff to research and recommend a campus- wide solution to: centralize file storage that all departments consume easily at a low cost/gb; provide cost- effective storage for researchers; create new revenue streams from non- NIU customers; minimize risk by providing for business continuity and disaster recovery through centralized management and data protection policies; free distributed IT from managing commodity infrastructure and allow them to support department- specific technology needs; free up capacity on high- cost, high- performing storage and backup infrastructure used to support NIU s data centers and enterprise systems. Criterion 3: Productivity / Efficiency Scope of Program This program manages 13 million GB of data on a dozen storage arrays and 30 servers that support home directories, departmental storage, application databases, research data, and backups. To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to roughly 300,000 DVDs, each holding a 2- hour high- definition movie. Storage administration includes: consultations with customers; analysis and design of storage solutions that will be both reliable and redundant; testing, configuration and implementation of storage arrays; providing access controls for server and application access to storage volumes; maintenance and monitoring 24/7/365 to identify performance issues and achieve optimal capacity. Question: 3.2 Productivity Comparison How well does the program perform compared to peer institutions? Cloud providers are the standard against which most storage cost comparisons are made. When the recommendation for a new storage infrastructure is funded, DoIT s offering will compare well with the the big cloud providers. DoIT s cost/gb/month will be slightly higher but there are no hidden network or transaction fees. Moreover, the data will be accessed over NIU s upgraded network more often than over the Internet so access will be quicker and more reliable. $ Per/GB/month I/O volume Cloud Provider Egress Storage 1,000 Class A / 10,000 class B Google $.12 -.$08 $0.026 $.01 / $.01 AWS $.09 -.$05 $.03 - $.0275 $.005 / $.004 Azure $ $05 $ $.0224 $.0036 / $.0036 NIU $0.00 $0.03 $0.00 December 12,

4 DoIT s costs will also compare well with other universities. DoIT s storage, snapshot and replication costs are on par with Emory and Stanford. Backup costs are less than Stanford s and more expensive than Emory s, but NIU will also have an additional lower cost option (snapshots plus replication) that will satisfy most of the file data protection needs. University Storage Snapshots Replication Snap+Rep Backup NIU Proposed $0.030 $0.030 $0.030 $0.060 $0.150 Emory $0.030 $0.033 $0.067 $0.040 Stanford $0.038 $0.038 $0.050 $0.300 Resource Comparison DoIT uses EMC products for the majority of its enterprise offerings. All are in Gartner s magic quadrant and recognized by Forbes as the clear leader in external storage. Stephen Foskett, a long- time storage expert says the number of storage administrators needed depends on skill sets, coverage and workload, rather than on the number of GBs managed. He suggests counting up skill sets required to support all the technologies, dividing by 1.5 (since it s hard for any one person to be good at more than three things and each skill set needs at least two people) and then multiplying by the size of the environment. DoIT s storage offering uses about 12 technologies (storage arrays, switches, host operating systems, backup products and management tools). DoIT doesn t have many of each technology so no multiplication is required. Dividing 12 by 1.5 yields 8 storage administrators for optimal staffing. DoIT has 1.2 FTEs spread among 4 staff members to support its storage offerings. Cost and Revenues Storage costs decrease at a rate of about 25% per year. Technology is constantly improving and disks capable of holding more data come out regularly and drop the per- unit cost with each generation. This long term trend is responsible for the rise of cloud- based storage like OneDrive and DropBox. It also opens up the possibility of cost effective research- friendly storage for limited term grants and faculty startup packages. The exponential decline allows central IT to store data for 20 years or more for a single well calculated up front payment, eliminating the problem of long term archival of research. Criterion 4: Internal & External Demand External Demand With data storage requirements increasing constantly, especially for video security and surveillance, there is an unmet external demand for well- performing and cost- effective storage. One regional police department is interested in storing over $100,000 per year of video data from dashboard and/or body cameras at NIU and a local school district is interested in using NIU as an off- site backup. Regional entities like these could bring money into NIU and allow us to purchase larger arrays at lower unit prices, lowering the per- unit cost of storage for the NIU community. Internal Demand An estimated 70% of file storage at NIU at least 30TB of data is currently housed on departmental servers that are out of warranty and no longer supported by the vendor. Moreover, these servers do not support current December 12,

5 desktop clients or mobile devices, nor are they able to download current anti- virus scanning signatures. Worse yet, most of these file servers are single points of failure and the risk to institutional data is both large and imminent. Criterion 5: Opportunity Analysis Cost Savings Opportunities There are two opportunities for cost- savings. 1. All NIU faculty, staff and students should move personal work files to OneDrive. It is a suitable location for even the most sensitive data and every file stored on this cloud- based offering means less money spent on internal storage and backup solutions. 2. Centralize and consolidate file storage throughout the campus. Economics of scale, both in purchasing and managing, are possible only with a centralized solution. Future Revenue / Resources Selling storage to regional entities, such as municipalities, school districts and police departments will enable procurement and management economies of scale, bring money into the university and enable large purchases, which will lower the cost of storage to the NIU community. Improvement Opportunities NIU should mandate moving to a centralized and secure storage offering. An estimated 70% of file storage is currently housed on departmentally- owned Netware servers with directly- attached storage drives. NIU faces immediate problems and risks: Much of the Netware server hardware is out of warranty and replacement parts are not easily found. The Netware operating system has not had new functionality added in several years and is no longer vendor- supported. Netware servers no longer support current default desktop and mobile clients. The support for legacy Netware methods will soon discontinue, rendering files inaccessible to both legacy and current clients. Netware anti- virus scanning signatures are no longer being updated by the vendor so files trapped in Netware storage are susceptible to infection. This has happened at least twice in the past six months. The Networker backup client has not been updated by the vendor in years and is coming off support. Most of these file servers are single points of failure. If one is unavailable (planned or unplanned), users cannot access their data. Moreover, the pricing model DoIT offers to customers today does not begin to cover the cost of data protection. Backups are offered free to NIU staff who purchase server administration from DoIT, but in reality, backups generally require times larger than the initial storage consumed. Clearly this is unsustainable and cannot continue. Opportunities in the Field If funded, DoIT s recommendation to move to a new network- attached storage environment will avoid risk, save money for all departments, and remove barriers to success. The project team and distributed IT staff specifically recommended purchasing EMC s Isilon storage solution through CDW- G: a reseller listed on the IPHEC contract. The initial capital outlay of $1.260M (~$252,000/year) would result in two immediate benefits to campus December 12,

6 customers: a 92% - $97% reduction in primary storage cost for all campus customers and elimination of single points of server failures and associated local and central Netware support issues while gaining high availability, redundancy, and quick response. Because DoIT was unable to self- fund or acquire outside funding for the initial capital outlay, NIU has effectively opted to pass up revenue opportunities, pay elevated maintenance costs and live with increased risk. December 12,