By 2008, ACU had deployed 160 servers across its production and disaster recovery data centres. The physical footprint was becoming difficult to sustain, with the university running out of data centre space while increasing heat output placed additional pressure on power and cooling systems.
Working with Parallo, ACU transformed its infrastructure through virtualisation, reducing its reliance on physical hardware and creating a more efficient environment that could respond significantly faster to the needs of the university. The transformation delivered an AU$450,000 capital saving, reduced server deployment from three weeks to 30 minutes and helped establish a foundation for ACU’s future cloud strategy.
When infrastructure growth becomes a constraint
ACU’s challenge went beyond running out of physical space. Its expanding IT environment was becoming increasingly expensive and resource-intensive to manage, while the university was seeing a poor return on its investment in physical hardware.
Disaster recovery was another concern. Powering up servers, storage and associated infrastructure could take four hours, leaving critical systems and information unavailable for longer than the university considered acceptable.
At the same time, ACU’s IT team was struggling to respond quickly enough when additional computing capacity was needed. Provisioning a new physical server could take around three weeks from ordering through to commissioning, creating delays for researchers and other university teams that needed access to additional resources.
ACU needed to reduce the management burden of its physical infrastructure while creating a technology environment that could provision resources much more quickly. It also wanted a platform that would provide a pathway towards emerging IT service delivery models, including cloud-based services.
Moving from physical infrastructure to virtualisation
After reviewing a range of providers, ACU engaged Parallo in 2012 to support its virtualisation and storage environment.
For ACU, access to specialist expertise was an important part of that decision. The managed service provided operational support across ACU’s virtualisation and storage environment, identifying issues as they arose and alerting the university’s IT team when intervention was required.
Parallo also helped ACU identify virtual machines that had been allocated more processing power or memory than they required. This allowed resources to be redistributed more effectively and helped the university get greater value from its infrastructure investment.
Significant savings and dramatically faster provisioning
The move to a virtualised environment delivered substantial operational and financial benefits. ACU removed 100 leased physical servers from its environment, generating a capital saving of AU$450,000 and reducing electricity consumption by 28 kilowatts.
The impact on agility was equally significant. Average server deployment time fell from three weeks to just 30 minutes, allowing the IT team to provide computing resources to researchers and other university staff much more quickly.
Disaster recovery also improved substantially. A process that previously required around four hours to bring servers, storage and supporting infrastructure online was replaced with automatic failover within 30 minutes.
With less physical infrastructure to administer, ACU’s IT team was able to redirect its time towards other priorities. The university was also able to accommodate rapid growth with only a small increase in IT staff.
Creating a foundation for what came next
The transformation gave ACU more than immediate cost and efficiency improvements. Virtualisation provided a more flexible foundation from which the university could continue evolving its approach to infrastructure and explore cloud-based technology and services.
Ongoing management and optimisation also helped ACU identify further opportunities to improve how its resources were being used.
“The partnership with Parallo is helping make us more aware of opportunities to achieve further benefits in this area.”
— Paul Campbell, IT Director, Australian Catholic University
By reducing its physical infrastructure footprint and making computing resources dramatically faster to provision, ACU created an IT environment better equipped to support the changing needs of its students, researchers and staff, while managing the cost of continued growth.
