University of New Hampshire revamps storage plan

The University of New Hampshire has crafted an enterprisewide storage blueprint and plans to award a contract later this month to implement its design.

The school started to evaluate its storage needs because of the likelihood that its Microsoft Exchange application will expand, said Tom Franke, assistant vice president and chief information officer at the university’s Computing and Information Services. But the university decided to widen its focus.

“The time was right to look at the whole architecture instead of looking at one application,” Franke said.

New Hampshire retained GlassHouse Technologies, a storage consulting firm, to help devise its storage strategy. GlassHouse helped the Durham, N.H., campus assess its requirements and prepared a strategic road map and implementation program for building the new storage infrastructure, according to GlassHouse.

A contract to field the storage environment is in the works. Franke said the university is evaluating proposals. An award is expected late this month.

The school’s new storage infrastructure will offer greater scalability, higher storage utilization and the ability to create storage tiers with varying price points and service-level agreements, GlassHouse said.