Huddersfield Uni plumps for EMC in £1m deal

University of Huddersfield has spent £1m on storage technology from EMC - and claims it will see a return on its investment (ROI) in 36 months.

The higher education establishment will deploy storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) equipment that will result in personal filing space for around 17,000 students and over 2,000 staff.

The deal will also result in consolidation from 180 to about 80 servers and saw EMC foes edged out.

Alan Radley, infrastructure systems development manager at University of Huddersfield, said EMC was chosen in a neck-and-neck race with rival HP. Previously a shortlist had boiled down to the four big storage vendors: EMC, HDS, HP and IBM.

"EMC, we found, offered the best technical solution, though not the cheapest," Radley told silicon.com.

He said key factors in the final decision were the scalability of the hardware and costs that would be saved each year on maintaining servers and backing up and restoring data.

Huddersfield Uni was introduced to EMC through Dell - a major partner for EMC in mid-range storage, usually under the Clariion brand - and the organisation ended up buying two EMC CX600 SAN systems and Celerra Network Server (CNS) NAS boxes.

Ridley added that he has previously happily used HP ProLiant servers - which would have given HP a foot in the storage door - but may next time consider Dell, previously only a PC supplier.

In related news, Dell and EMC today announced they've refreshed their arrays for networked storage.