The IT infrastructure renewal at the University of Turku has significantly eased the IT system administration work. "Our previous equipment had been acquired one part at a time from different vendors. We no longer wanted to be faced with the question of whom to turn to when running into problems", says Eino Tuominen, application designer at the University of Turku's datacentre. The winner of the new datacentre equipment tender was a converged infrastructure solution provided by Proact and Resolute. The datacentre solution based on Flexpod, consists of converged servers including management software as well as network infrastructure, storage solutions and virtualisation.
As an independent datacentre and cloud expert, Proact is the single point of contact for the solution. From a client's viewpoint, information regarding areas of responsibility is actually irrelevant.
"We no longer need to think about whom to contact when we need assistance", says Eino Tuominen. As the overall solution is flexible, customers may contact Proact even if the required measures were related to areas for which another vendor is responsible. Proact makes sure that all vendors involved sort out the situation between themselves. "The ball never bounces back to us", says Tuominen.
The new equipment has been used in production for over a year. The experiences have been good.
"The new infrastructure has worked just as the vendors promised", says Eino Tuominen. He has been happy with, the service profiles of the new servers, as they have made particularly the upgrades easier. A service profile defines a physical server as well as its storage and network properties. If a server needed to be changed, a replacement server could directly replace the old server.
The University of Turku was already enjoying the benefits of server virtualisation and scalable storage system in their previous datacentre. The migration to new premises was seamless. Hundreds of virtual servers that were in use could be moved to the physical servers of the new datacentre without any downtime.
"We carry out most of the installations and daily administration work by ourselves. We naturally used Proact's expertise during the renewal and migration of the datacentre infrastructure", Eino Tuominen says.
