et al.

The server consolidation is aimed at the renewal of the computer infrastructure providing essential services (student administration system, e-mail, university portal etc.) for daily operation at University of Szeged. The main aspects also covered the increase of the operation safety and setting up redundancy. The project required the previous development of the server room of University of Szeged Computer Centre (power network and air-conditioning).

By the server consolidation, a scalable and virtualized blade, storage and backup system was installed forming a unified hardware and software platform. The main components are the following: HP blade servers, EMC storage system, HP D2D and Dell tape backup systems with VMware virtualization and Networker backup software. The sizing of the system was designed to support the current services, and the future developments as well. We have built a system which can be easily developed either horizontally or vertically.

The actual procurement was preceded by a long planning process. The project is supported from TIOP (Social Infrastructure Operative Programme of the Hungarian government funded by EU) sources available from 2007 to 2011. More than 90% of the active services was migrated to the new system in a 12 months period from the summer of 2011.

This paper presents the main steps of planning, purchasing, installation and configuration, as well as the experiences of last 18 months’ operation.