University of Illinois System

AITS

Administrative Information Technology Services

Storage Management

Service Description

The Storage Management service is a professional service that provides storage, 24/7 monitoring, and support services to University of Illinois clients. The Storage Management service provides professional support services that leverage industry best practices for supporting and maintaining complex multi-tiered storage management arrays. The following is a sampling of the types of services that can be provided to customers of this service:

  • SAN is available 99.99 percent during scheduled service times.
  • Assignment of storage within one week of the original request from the client.
  • 24/7 monitoring and surveillance of storage services to provide highly available systems.
  • 24/7 service desk to provide continuous costumer care services.

All Storage Management Arrays are securely maintained and patched in regular cycles to provide a high degree of security to protect sensitive data and keep the applications functioning properly and smoothly.

Reliable storage services aimed at the highest availability to end users. A standard Sunday morning maintenance window from 6 a.m. – 12 p.m. is utilized where needed to apply critical updates, maintenance or upgrades to application services.

Redundant, distributed architectures are utilized where supported to keep the highest availability to end users.

Key understanding of storage performance and tuning services are provided to keep the applications running as efficiently as possible for a better user experience.

Storage Management Service is provided which is a reliable, monitored, secure, and managed solution with the flexibility and performance of a distributed computing solution.

The Storage Management team has extensive experience with a wide variety of application software technologies, tools and platforms including but not limited to the following:

  • EMC Unisphere
  • EMC VNX Monitoring & Reporting
  • Cisco Data Center Network Manger
  • Cisco Device Manager

Benefits of using the Storage Management service include:

  • Services can be provided to University customers for nearly any imaginable technology
  • Cost avoidance for customers who do not have to maintain and provide their own in-house resources and skills for performing this type of technical support work on a full time basis when a full-time resource is not required
  • No need for customers to have to acquire, maintain or support their own in-house, costly arrays or storage management infrastructure
  • Solutions that comply with industry standard deployment best practices, security standards/policies and accessibility policies and statutes
  • 24/7 support and availability for customer applications
  • All data on the storage arrays is securely maintained and backed up in case of a disastrous event

Hours of Availability

This service is available to customers 24/7, excluding planned outages, maintenance windows and unavoidable events. Maintenance windows are used only when needed for planned changes that have gone through the AITS Change Control Process. In addition to the standard AITS maintenance windows, site-specific and service-specific changes may be coordinated with customers at non-standard times.

Standard storage management maintenance windows are defined as:

  • 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. each Sunday when application usage is at its lowest

Customer Responsibilities

  • Identify a primary point of contact to work with AITS in coordinating the activities being performed by the service
  • All new work should be initiated through the ITPC process
  • Support requests relating to the use of the service will be initiated by opening an incident or request ticket with the AITS Service Desk

How Do We Charge?

This service is offered as part of the Workstation Support set of services and the Server Support set of services. Pricing and the base Service Level Agreement for these two sets of services are available.