Case Study: Walter Sisulu University boosts digital campus storage and backup with Huawei OceanStor N8000

OceanStor N8000 Boosts Educational Delivery

Walter Sisulu University, South Africa’s fastest-growing university of science and technology, needed a better way to support its expanding digital campus. With more than 24,000 students and staff across five campuses, the university was struggling with data silos, inconsistent storage performance, high maintenance costs, and a lack of unified backup for teaching and research data. Huawei’s OceanStor N8000 clustered NAS was selected to help address these storage and data protection challenges.

Huawei implemented a centralized OceanStor N8000 solution with clustered NAS storage at each campus, layered storage for different workload needs, and a dedicated disaster recovery and backup setup at the primary campus. The result was simplified operations, improved storage utilization, and better protection for key data, while reducing TCO by more than 20% versus the original environment. The platform has supported continued growth, including a capacity expansion in 2013, and can scale from TB-level to as much as 15 PB.

Walter Sisulu University

Courtney Walker

Director of Information Communication Technology