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Video: Case Study — the University of Alabama at Birmingham

Learn how the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Dell teamed up to deploy a private storage cloud infrastructure.

October 10, 2014
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John-Paul Robinson, a Software Architect at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Kamesh Pemmaraju, a Project Manager for Cloud Solutions at Dell, discuss how the University IT staff deployed a private storage cloud infrastructure using the Dell OpenStack cloud solution with Dell servers, storage, networking and OpenStack, and Inktank Ceph.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham gives scientists and researchers a massive, on-demand, virtual storage cloud using OpenStack and Ceph for less than $0.41 per gigabyte.

After assessing a number of traditional storage scenarios, the University partnered with Dell and Inktank to architect a centralized cloud storage platform that was capable of scaling seamlessly and rapidly, was cost-effective, and that could leverage a single hardware infrastructure for the OpenStack compute and storage environment.

Five lessons that they learned throughout the process:

  • Recognize when a partnership will help you achieve your goals.
  • Use the cloud — that’s what it’s for! The sooner you start using the cloud, the sooner you start thinking like the cloud.
  • The fabric is flexible. Let it help you solve your problems.
  • The code is the documentation…and that’s a good thing.
  • You can learn from research and engage as a partner.

Check out the video above to learn more, straight from the source.

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