The University of Kent, a university in the UK, has partnered with Hitachi Vantara and Trustmarque to deploy a modern storage architecture that enhances service continuity, strengthens cybersecurity and supports the university’s 17,000 students and research community.
With its existing storage approaching end-of-life, the University of Kent required a modern and resilient data storage solution. The university delivers approximately 300 applications to support its students and faculty, in addition to specialist IT infrastructure for advanced scientific research such as genetic sequencing.
With the National Cyber Security Centre revealing that the UK faces four nationally significant cyberattacks every week, the university needed an active architecture to reduce cyber-risk and ensure service continuity in the event of disaster.
The University of Kent selected Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One, delivered by its long-standing partner Trustmarque, to provide robust, high-performance, scalable block storage for its key digital services. The project coincided with the university’s broader Digital Transformation, including the development of three modern data centres.
The deployment features Hitachi Vantara’s VSP One Block, File and Object capabilities, with Hitachi Vantara’s global-active device providing high availability and Veeam’s backup technology. This solution enables seamless data replication, immutable snapshot backups and rapid disaster recovery to safeguard the university’s data environment.
“Working with Hitachi Vantara and Trustmarque has provided a seamless transition to our new system, which is already providing measurable results. For example, we can backup user files around 95% faster than before,” said Darren Chapman, Infrastructure Development Manager, University of Kent.
“We can now recover our production systems around 80% faster. And when we finish deploying the necessary compute at our secondary site, we’ll be able to restore our services instantly.”
The new architecture provides high availability, improved backup performance and energy-efficient operations. With 3.5PB of storage available, the organisation has the headroom to create multiple immutable snapshot backups and save them to multiple backup destinations. Additionally, dynamic carbon reduction technology from Hitachi Vantara helps minimise energy consumption by switching CPUs into eco-mode during periods of low activity.
“At Hitachi Vantara, we believe high-performing infrastructure and environmental stewardship must go hand in hand,” said Jason Beckett, CTO for EMEA, Hitachi Vantara. “With the VSP One data platform powering the University of Kent, we are proud to enable not only faster recovery and resilience but also a greener footprint. By helping institutions like Kent reduce energy use, optimise storage utilisation and meet their sustainability goals, we see technology as a force for both performance and social responsibility.”
The solution provides additional performance and resilience benefits, including stronger cyber-resilience through immutable snapshots and multi-site replication, enhanced performance with nightly user file backups running 95% faster and zero downtime for end-users, with migration completed in hours and no impact to teaching or research continuity.
“IT cuts across everything we do, from high-quality teaching to world-leading research,” said Daniel Knox, Assistant Director of IT, Infrastructure and Cybersecurity, University of Kent. “With Hitachi and Trustmarque, we have created a resilient and energy-efficient platform that will support our students, faculty and researchers for years to come.”
