Intelligent CIO North America Issue 22 | Page 62

CASE STUDY
Aerial view of Westwood and the UCLA campus in
Los Angeles

The University of California-Los Angeles ( UCLA ) needed to purchase and deploy a storage solution with enough flexibility , capacity and scalability to serve its varied user base . It also needed to procure this storage to make business sense for the university , given its fee-for-service IT model .

With the Nexsan E-Series now in its environment , the university has delivered superior service to its users while exceeding all key metrics it set .
The IT infrastructure challenge
UCLA is known worldwide for the breadth and quality of its academic , research , health care , cultural , continuing education and athletic programs . UCLA ’ s strength is its size , allowing for exceptional diversity and virtually limitless possibility . The university is a shared public asset that benefits society by educating students , creating knowledge through research discoveries , powering the economy and improving quality of life .
UCLA ’ s central IT infrastructure is a fee-for-service model ; researchers , departments and other users lease a specific amount of storage from the university for a specific period of time .
Their uses for that storage range all the way from supporting cutting-edge research to archiving data and beyond , and because of this variety IT administrators have to be careful that their entire infrastructure is flexible enough to deliver proper service for all users in all cases .
For example , their biggest users are in the medical domain ; they have to ensure the system complies with regulations and security needs in addition to being fast , available and reliable . As capacity needs have grown , and user requirements and IT features have evolved ,
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