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Möbius Partners and Texas Christian University:

Standing Up Active-Active Data Centers with Zero Downtime

challenges:

  • Separate data centers and aging storage
  • Lag during high availability tests
  • Disaster preparedness
  • Business Continuity

solutions:

  • Ease of management
  • HPE Peer Persistence allows high-availability
  • Failover capabilities under 5 minutes with no data loss
  • Stretch and metro clusters allow for multi-level of resiliency on storage, compute, and networking
  • Confidence in IT from students and staff
  • Data compaction 3.2:1, data compression 2.1 and deduplication 1.5
  • Documentation and training to prepare the TCU team

benefits

  • Active-Active Data Centers
  • VMware vSphere 6.5
  • 2 HPE 8440 StoreServe All-Flash Arrays


Texas Christian University (TCU) has long been an HP-based organization with significant investment made in its equipment. As the university grew, so did its imperative to provide uncompromising data support. Möbius Partners has enjoyed a long and trusted relationship with TCU, and were ready to help them explore options that would satisfy their capacity needs while maintaining a solid, reliable user experience for the university’s students, faculty and staff.

The key to helping TCU meet its data-related challenge head-on was to evolve to an active-active data center designed with a higher level of redundancy and resilience. Doug Cagle, Senior Account Executive with Möbius Partners, explains, “To capitalize on TCU’s previous hardware investment, we customized our approach by using features already available with their system but not yet utilized. We were able to extend the value of the university’s existing technology by stretching its storage capacity.”

While the project was phased over two years, the bulk of the innovation and its related work happened in a fast, intense three-month timeframe. In that short amount of time, the team not only optimized TCU’s existing system, but also expanded its capacity, designed new system workflows, provided proof of concept and migrated data.

“The moment of truth was our full test of the system with live databases and data,” said Felipe Neto, Senior Solutions Architect with Möbius Partners. “TCU was no different than other organizations we’ve worked with – their allowable margin of error was zero. As we “killed” sections of the infrastructure in one data center, the redundancies in the second data center immediately and smoothly picked up the load. Not a single user noticed any change during the test. As far as they were concerned, all was working as it should. Our customized solution became a functional reality for TCU.”

TCU’s active-active data centers and system continue to operate as designed. And as the university continues to grow, Möbius Partners’ solution can grow along with it, as it was designed to easily scale up or down as needed.

Möbius Partners appreciates the opportunity to provide TCU with a unique solution to fit its needs. More importantly, Möbius Partners values the trust the university’s staff has placed in them, and it seems the feeling is mutual. Josiah Miller, Systems Administrator with TCU stated, “I’ve worked with Möbius Partners on several projects, and the support has been very thorough, even in our unique environment.”

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