NORCROSS, GA.—StorTrends announced that the University of Maryland’s Department of Transportation Services has selected StorTrends high-performance storage arrays to be the core of its newly implemented virtual infrastructure. With StorTrends, DOTS is able to achieve ultra-high storage performance, true storage tiering, data deduplication and archiving, with a graphical user interface.
Serving over 37,000 students and 13,000 staff and hundreds of daily visitors, the University of Maryland’s DOTS in College Park, Md., is responsible for the day-to-day management of every single campus parking spot and the university’s fleet of more than 60 shuttle-UM transit service vehicles. To support these valued student services, DOTS uses a number of technology solutions to help streamline key processes, such as the management of university parking permits. The University of Maryland DOTS was among the first campuses in the country to implement a virtual permit system, which uses the vehicle’s license plate as its permit. To support this process, it uses license plate recognition cameras which are mounted to enforcement trucks to scan license plates to ensure they are properly parked in the correct lots. After analyzing the data in real-time, the system can alert operators when it fails to find a license plate match so that a citation can be issued.
The parking enforcement system requires a healthy amount of storage capacity and performance to remain at optimal productivity. To support the environment, the University of Maryland DOTS has recently virtualized 90 percent of its infrastructure using VMware. Today, the environment is comprised of 17 VMware ESX virtual servers, two physical HP servers and several Microsoft SQL databases to support DOTS-specific shared drives and directories, the DOTS website and a host of other applications and systems, including its parking permit operations.
Until recently, the organization used a more expensive SAN solution that lacked a GUI that was easy to navigate and use. As storage capacity requirements for the DOTS system continued to explode, the organization determined that a more cost-efficient storage solution was required. The new solution needed to deliver major enterprise-class features all with a GUI that was simple to use. That’s when the University of Maryland DOTS discovered StorTrends.
Since implementing StorTrends, the University of Maryland DOTS has migrated its VM LUNS from their legacy storage array to the StorTrends solution. The process has been seamless using the usable GUI and VMware Plugin. Now the department benefits from exceptional processing speeds and hasn’t even come close to touching top-end CPU/memory. Future plans for the department include purchasing additional StorTrends storage arrays to support a secondary disaster recovery site.
