European tender Amarantis Onderwijsgroep

SARA Computing and Networking Services has won the European tender for the centralization of the server park of Amarantis Onderwijsgroep. SARA was selected via a closed tender procedure on which 14 parties had enrolled. Amarantis will renew and install its server park in the two datacenters of SARA/Vancis in Amsterdam and Almere. Amarantis Onderwijsgroep is a school organization with more than 30,000 students and 60 schools and courses in Noord-Holland, Flevoland and Utrecht.

Amarantis will use the SAN (Storage Area Network) infrastructure that has been built redundantly and geographically distributed at both datacenters. This makes it possible to double the storage via synchronous replication to a second datacenter. The connectivity between two datacenters is realized via redundant fiber connections.

As from 2010, SARA's subsidiary Vancis focuses on the market-oriented activities of SARA. Vancis is responsible for the co-location and for the management of an on demand storage service that allows for flexible – as needed – storage capacity. This is a cost effective solution, since Amarantis only has to pay for the capacity that is used – the so-called pay as you grow model.

The contract also provides a backup service with so-called off-site tape backup and archiving capabilities. The backup solution consists of two large StorageTek SL8500 tape silo’s, equipped with IBM TSM software, at the datacenters in Amsterdam and Almere. This way of making backups is very effective since it is based on an ‘incremental forever policy’. Amarantis is in full control with respect to defining the backup policy (retention times, version management etc).

Vancis can optionally also supply Virtual Machines (using VMware). This possibility might be considered at a later stage.