Nanjing Tech University

Background and Challenges

In order to strengthen the construction of new engineering disciplines and promote innovation in engineering education, Nanjing Tech University urgently needed to upgrade its existing IT infrastructure. The university’s various business systems were mainly running on physical machines and VMware environments, facing several challenges:

1. The IT infrastructure was built early on, with aging and diverse equipment, leading to high maintenance costs.
2. Business systems were tightly coupled, with slow deployment and long application launch processes.
3. The existing virtualization platform had inconsistent standards, scales, and environments, resulting in multiple resource silos.
4. Resources were difficult to schedule elastically, and platform upgrades, scaling, and migration would affect business operations.
5. The resource approval process was cumbersome, and even after approval, resources still had to be manually created and allocated.

Given the current situation, Nanjing Tech Universityy urgently needed to build an advanced and comprehensive cloud platform to meet the needs of the university’s various business systems and create an integrated cloud service portal for the entire campus.

Product Solution

Nanjing Tech University upgraded its existing data center virtualization resources by adopting ZStack HCI, providing high-performance and highly available cloud hosts, cloud storage, and cloud network resource pools for critical information systems, including the logistics service monitoring system, human resources system, and student management system.

Using ZStack HCI’s virtualization management module, the university unified the management of its original VMware virtualization resources. Through V2V migration, the business workloads from VMware virtualization were migrated to ZStack HCI, enabling unified management of the original VMware resources. Additionally, ZStack HCI’s disaster recovery module provided various backup services for critical business systems.

Moreover, by introducing automated management technologies, the university was able to offer multi-tenant resource self-management and self-service capabilities, enabling dynamic allocation of cloud platform resources to various administrative departments, colleges, and departments. Each tenant could independently manage resources and perform tasks such as creating cloud hosts, improving the efficiency of campus business operations.

Customer Benefits

1. Unified Management and Automated Operations: By introducing automated management technologies, the university achieved centralized management, scheduling, and maintenance of various IT resources, improving IT operations and shortening the system launch time for various business platforms.
2. Support for Multi-Tenant Resource Self-Management and Self-Service: Dynamic allocation of cloud platform resources was provided to administrative departments, colleges, and departments. Each tenant could independently manage resources and create cloud hosts through the SSO protocol, effectively integrating with the “Smart Nanjing University of Technology” application.
3. Open API, Supporting School’s Secondary Development: Standard API interfaces were provided to facilitate integration between the hyper-converged cloud platform and the “Smart Nanjing Tech University” application, such as the online service hall, while enabling future integration with third-party PaaS and SaaS software.
4. Dual Backup of Critical Data to Enhance Data Security: Critical IT systems were backed up both locally and remotely to ensure that in the event of a disaster at one data center, data could be restored.
5. Reduced Maintenance Pressure and Improved Fault Resolution Efficiency: ZStack HCI provided multiple ways to warn and notify operators in real time, helping them monitor the system’s status and quickly locate and resolve faults, ensuring smooth operation.