The University of Paderborn's Center for Information and Media Technologies is using HP Lefthand SAN/iQ. The INI Group interviewed Christopher Odenbach, head of the department.This is how Christopher describes his role:

“I work in the Center for Information and Media Technologies which has to be divided into sub-departments. We are the IT department. The IT department again is divided into several sub-departments and I am the head of the servers and systems department. I’ve worked for the university now for about ten years. My overall responsibilities are nearly everything technical here, of course most of it server or systems related. We provide other departments here and the whole university with the central IT services which just start with all sorts of physical cabling in the buildings and managing of switches and routers and installing servers and installing operating systems and configuring web servers and mail servers, authentication, authorization stuff.”

The following is an overview of the Oxford University: 

• Fifty physical servers
• Two hundred virtual machines
• Linux, Windows and VMware
• Thirty-four terabytes of total storage
• Fifteen thousand students
• One thousand four hundred in the Center for Information and Media Technologies

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 university?
   
5. Can you give us examples of how the HP LeftHand provided real value to your university?
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