Case Study: Shanghai Ocean University achieves unified storage and disaster recovery with Huawei

University Merges Old and New Storage Systems

Shanghai Ocean University (SHOU), a century-old research university in China, needed to support growing IT and storage demands across its digital campus, digital library, and marine supercomputing center. Its existing mix of FC SAN, IP SAN, and NAS systems from multiple vendors created information silos, low storage utilization of under 50%, weak disaster recovery protection, and difficult day-to-day maintenance. Huawei provided the storage technology foundation for SHOU’s environment, including earlier S5500 arrays and N8300 NAS engines.

Huawei designed and delivered a unified storage solution built around an S5500T storage array, N8500 Clustered NAS engines, a VIS6600T virtual storage gateway, and InfraControl management software, while reusing existing storage assets. The new platform created a shared storage resource pool, enabled local disaster recovery, and centralized O&M across servers, storage, and switches. As a result, SHOU improved storage efficiency, strengthened service continuity, and reduced management complexity, with O&M efficiency estimated to rise by more than 20% and capacity scalability reaching up to 15 PB.

Shanghai Ocean University