The University of Florida's Department of Housing is using HP Lefthand SAN/iQ. The INI Group interviewed Charles Benjamin, senior systems and network administrator.This is how Charles describes his role:

"My title is Senior Systems and Network Administrator. I have a team of five really great engineers that make up the systems and network administration team. We support the network - the Internet connectivity for the eight thousand, five hundred students living on campus in our residence halls and also those some eight hundred housing and student affair employees. In addition to that, we support what I call applications systems, such as your Exchange and SharePoint and also the phone system for the employees. Breaking it down a little bit more in detail on the responsibilities, on the network side, for the students, we have over ten thousand Ethernet ports. We also started providing wireless 802.11 A, B, G and N. Basically everything as it relates to the networking, supporting the students, employees, providing services so another aspect of our responsibilities is the security integrity of network and the data...we maintain a number of security appliances and applications for security. We have a number of monitoring systems. And the SAN falls right into this data integrity portion of it."

The following is an overview of the University of Florida, Department of Housing IT environment:

• Serve fifty thousand students (eight thousand, five hundred on campus)
• One hundred sixty-two buildings, twenty-four residence halls
  
• Eight hundred employees (Dept of Housing and Dept of Student Affairs)
  
• Four server cluster running VMware ESX 3.5
  
• Six DL320 modules running SAN/iQ 8.0 each supporting three point six terabytes

Listen to individual answers by clicking on the following questions:

1. Why did you decide to implement VMware?
   
2. Why did you decide to implement the HP LeftHand solution within your environment?
   
3. Can you share with us the process you went through to decide on implementing HP LeftHand?
4. Can you give us examples of how VMware provided real value to your organization?
   
5. Can you give us examples of how the HP LeftHand provided real value to your organization?
6. How has VMware improved the overall economic effectiveness within your IT operations?
   
7. Can you give us any insights on the HP LeftHand that would be useful for other IT professionals considering the solution?
   
8. What are the next steps using the HP LeftHand?
   
9. Would you recommend the HP Lefthand to other IT professionals? And can you tell us why?

For more information on HP Lefthand, go to www.lefthandnetworks.com

For more information on VMware, go to www.vmware.com