University of Notre Dame Case Study

Notre Dame employs hybrid cloud storage platform from Spectra Logic
overview
Founded in 1842, the University of Notre Dame provides a distinctive voice in higher education that is at once rigorously intellectual, unapologetically moral in orientation, and firmly embracing of a service ethos. The nation and world’s preeminent Catholic university and rated among the top 25 of all U.S. institutions of higher learning, Notre Dame offers 75 undergraduate majors and is organized into eight colleges and schools, almost 70 centers and special programs, eight major areas of research and the Hesburgh Libraries.

Spectra Logic provided the University of Notre Dame with a modern solution that was scalable, cost-effective, and enabled extensive efficient workflows. We’ve had positive experiences with Spectra’s products in the past, making Spectra the obvious choice for our next initiative.

Mike Anderson, Storage Systems Administrator at Notre Dame’s main South Bend campus

The Challenge

The University of Notre Dame had several unique requirements to fulfill when managing its expansive collection of data. Notre Dame’s Office of Information Technologies (OIT) serves a wide range of clients on campus and was tasked with finding an enterprise solution that would work for all of them. They also wanted to explore the benefits of incorporating a cloud tier into their storage architecture and establish the best strategy to leverage cloud technology into their workflow.

The Solution

In 2014, Notre Dame consolidated its storage environment by deploying a Spectra T950 Tape Library to back up and archive data from several university departments. The T950’s innovative design allows OIT to easily divide the library into different partitions for research data and media assets. Furthermore, the library supports nearly every software package written for open systems tape, delivering the technology backbone to meet the multitude of user requirements.

More recently, the university deployed a Spectra BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform with CatDV MAM to upgrade their solution and address the enduring media management challenges. Notre Dame Studios’ previous asset management solution incurred a lot of administrative labor costs to manually migrate files from spinning disk to backup and archive tiers, and it did not give users the ability to bring back content on their own schedules. Because of BlackPearl, Notre Dame Studios can now automate the number of copies made on each storage target and how long the data will reside there.

Environment Snapshot

  • Spectra® BlackPearl® Hybrid Storage Platform
  • 5-frame Spectra® T950 Tape Library
  • Fourteen LTO-6 drives
  • Four LTO-8 drives
  • 1,600 enabled tape slots
  • Spectra BlueScale® Professional Encryption
  • ~2PB of data

University of Notre Dame Customer Story

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