National Tsing Hua University

In 2016, National Tsing Hua University formally merged with Hsinchu University of Education, leading to additional financial support for system expansion from the Ministry of Education. But when the merger of two schools was complete, the IT budget returned to normal. IT needed to take precautions and look ahead to the best allocation of limited resources. It needed to replace software and hardware systems that had high maintenance costs.

NetApp AFF C190 storage, positioned as the entry-level all-flash option that supports both SAN and NAS, was very attractive. Zhang saw that it could be used to host the core database and provide archival storage services. NTHU plans to deploy its data warehouse sequentially to produce various reports in response to the needs of each department, and the database used to store the reporting system’s metadata and objects will be placed on the AFF C190 system. NTHU also uses two VMs to run the software firewall service, and their firewall images are stored on the AFF C190 system too, providing a failover mechanism. A single AFF C190 array can be used for multiple applications, so it is very cost effective.