How the University of Waikato Built a Foundation for the Future
Modernizing research data infrastructure with Qumulo to simplify management, improve resilience, and enable future growth.
The University of Waikato needed to replace an aging Dell PowerScale environment, still commonly referred to by its original name, Isilon, supporting hundreds of millions of files across research, teaching, and administrative workloads. Rather than treating the project as a like-for-like hardware refresh, the University used the opportunity to reconsider how enterprise file storage should be operated, consumed, scaled, and managed.
The University selected Qumulo running on HPE GreenLake, creating a consumption-based, multi-site architecture designed to support growing research needs while reducing the operational burden of enterprise storage. The University migrated approximately 540 TB across 327 million files from Isilon to Qumulo, carefully phasing the transition around academic and research requirements to minimise disruption.
Today, the University operates Qumulo across its primary Hamilton environment and a secondary disaster recovery site in Auckland. The infrastructure supports current research and academic workloads while giving the University options to expand its use of S3, improve data analytics and lifecycle management, support external research collaboration, and extend data to additional locations or the cloud as requirements evolve.
The Challenge: An Isilon Refresh Became an Opportunity to Rethink Storage
The University had relied on Isilon as part of its enterprise file storage infrastructure. As that environment approached end of life, the infrastructure team needed to determine what would replace it. Rather than automatically deploying another generation of the same platform, the University evaluated whether a different architecture could better support its long-term infrastructure strategy.
The scale made that decision significant. The University was managing approximately 540 TB across 327 million files, 140 SMB shares, and 30 NFS shares. Research data kept growing, while teaching, research, and administrative services depended on reliable access to that information. Any replacement had to preserve familiar SMB and NFS access while fitting around the academic calendar and active research workloads, which left little room for outages or final cutovers.
The University also wanted greater operational simplicity, clearer visibility into capacity consumption, strong disaster recovery, and more flexible scaling. Rather than another large upfront capital investment based on predicted future capacity, the University wanted to move toward a consumption-based OpEx structure through HPE GreenLake.
Better visibility into data consumption was another consideration. The University wanted to understand which areas were consuming capacity, where growth was occurring, and, eventually, how infrastructure costs could be more closely tied to the groups generating them. Replacing Isilon therefore offered an opportunity to establish a different operating model for research data, not simply to purchase new storage.
Why Qumulo?
Qumulo gave the University a way to modernize its file infrastructure without requiring researchers and applications to abandon the workflows they already understood. The platform provides unified SMB and NFS services, snapshots, replication, access controls, and real-time capacity visibility within the HPE GreenLake consumption model.
The University maintains traditional enterprise file access while simplifying administration behind the scenes. Capacity grows with demand rather than being treated exclusively as a large periodic hardware purchase, and the Qumulo architecture offers options to expand beyond the University's current environment as requirements inevitably change. A key requirement is a data foundation that provides agility across the core, edge, and cloud.
Just as importantly, the University needed confidence that it could move hundreds of millions of existing files away from Isilon without turning the storage transition into a disruptive event for researchers.
Moving 540 TB and 327 Million Files Away From Isilon
The University needed to migrate approximately 540 TB comprising roughly 327 million files, including 140 SMB shares and 30 NFS shares. The project had to work around the academic calendar and active research workloads, leaving limited windows for outages and final cutovers.
The University used a phased approach to move workloads in controlled waves, completing the migration in just a few months while maintaining data integrity, preserving permissions, and minimizing disruption. Atempo Miria moved the data over 25 Gb networking. The University chose a migration pace that fit its academic and research requirements, but the solution can accelerate migrations when shorter timelines are needed.
Qumulo supports a variety of migration technologies and approaches based on each customer's environment and requirements. Since the University's migration, Qumulo has introduced Qumulo SLURP, the Simple Lightweight Universal Replication Program, a high-speed data movement engine designed to simplify large-scale migrations from third-party NAS platforms, including Dell PowerScale. SLURP was not yet available when the University performed its migration.
Regardless of the migration technology, the University's experience shows an important point: moving a large file environment away from Isilon or NetApp doesn't have to disrupt the people or applications using the data. As Robert Jurgensen, Head of Digital Infrastructure at The University of Waikato, described the transition:
“It was pretty much seamless. Business as usual. Researchers continued consuming storage essentially the same way they had with Isilon. Their SMB and NFS workflows remained familiar even though the infrastructure underneath them had changed.”
For organizations considering moving away from Isilon, that continuity matters. A storage modernization project does not necessarily have to become a user or workload modernization project.
Less Storage Administration, More Infrastructure Flexibility
The differences between the old and new environments became more apparent behind the scenes. One of the University's goals was to reduce the specialized administration required to run enterprise storage. Today, the University does not need a dedicated storage administrator focused exclusively on Qumulo. Instead, the broader infrastructure team easily shares responsibility.
Jurgensen said the platform has been straightforward enough for additional team members to learn without requiring months of specialized training. Three or four members of the infrastructure organization are now comfortable operating Qumulo, reducing dependence on a single storage specialist.
The University's upgrade experience has followed a similar pattern. Qumulo's support team helps with software upgrades and security updates, while the process remains straightforward. The result is an environment that can support significant research data without storage constantly demanding the infrastructure team's attention.
Better Visibility into Research Data
Modernizing the storage platform has also given the University better insight into the data it manages. Qumulo provides visibility into utilization and performance, while the University's infrastructure team is exploring Qumulo APIs and additional visualization capabilities to gain deeper insight into the environment.
For a research institution, capacity management involves more than knowing how many terabytes remain available. The University wants to understand who is consuming capacity, how quickly individual areas are growing, and whether data occupying primary storage is still actively being used.
Jurgensen described a future in which the infrastructure team could identify, for example, a research group with 150 TB of data that had not been accessed for several years. That information could support a conversation about whether the data still needs to occupy primary storage, could move to another tier, or whether the capacity could be reclaimed for active research. Rather than respond to growth by simply buying more storage, the University wants to make infrastructure decisions based on how it uses its data.
Extending Qumulo Beyond Traditional File Storage
The University is already using Qumulo beyond conventional SMB and NFS file services. One example is the University's learning management system, where the infrastructure team has used Qumulo's S3 capabilities to create a read-only live copy of production data for support and development environments.
Previously, maintaining those environments could require repeatedly moving production exports into them. The new approach provides a common staging point and reduces the need to continually move production exports between environments. It is an early example of how the University can use Qumulo for more than simply recreating the Isilon environment it replaced.
Data Sovereignty and the Importance of Choice
The University's modernization strategy is not based on moving everything into the public cloud. For portions of its research environment, keeping data on-premises remains important because of governance and data sovereignty considerations. Research datasets can include sensitive information, including medical and Indigenous (Māori) data, where the University must carefully consider where information is stored and how it is managed.
That made a strong on-premises architecture an important requirement when the University evaluated its Isilon replacement. At the same time, the University did not want today's infrastructure decision to limit tomorrow's options. Jurgensen sees value in expanding the Qumulo environment as requirements change, whether that means additional on-premises locations, cloud infrastructure, edge research locations, or a combination of all.
The Future: Bringing Research Data Closer to Researchers
University research increasingly involves collaboration across institutions, locations, and countries. The University of Waikato works with researchers and organizations internationally, and traditional remote access can create friction when external researchers need VPN connectivity, institutional credentials, or other mechanisms just to reach the datasets needed for collaborative work.
The University is investigating ways to provide an experience closer to modern file-sharing services while maintaining the governance and infrastructure controls it requires. Another possibility is placing appropriate datasets closer to the researchers working with them rather than requiring every collaborator to reach back to Hamilton.
“A key priority is making collaboration with external researchers much more seamless. As our needs evolve, we’re confident Qumulo has given us the right data platform to tackle that and whatever comes next.” – Robert Jurgensen
The University is therefore looking closely at Qumulo’s complete portfolio, particularly broader S3 services, distributed data access, monitoring, single sign-on integration, tiering, archiving, cloud connectivity, ransomware protection, and cyber recovery. Jurgensen described the broader opportunity as expanding the “fabric of Qumulo” across additional locations as the University's needs evolve.
The goal is not cloud for the sake of cloud. It is giving the University more choices about where data should live, based on accessibility, economics, performance, collaboration, and governance.
Business Impact
540 TB moved away from Isilon. The team migrated approximately 327 million files across 140 SMB and 30 NFS shares while maintaining continuity for research, teaching, and administrative services.
Minimal disruption to users. Researchers continued accessing data through familiar SMB and NFS workflows, even as the underlying infrastructure changed.
Two-site resilience. Qumulo operates across the University's primary Hamilton environment and its Auckland disaster recovery location, with 10 nodes at each site and near-real-time replication.
Less dependence on specialized storage administration. Several infrastructure team members can manage Qumulo rather than relying on a dedicated storage specialist.
Greater visibility into research data. Capacity and utilization information provides a foundation for better decisions about data growth, retention, tiering, and future infrastructure requirements.
A platform for future research collaboration. The University is exploring how S3, distributed access, tiering, archiving, cloud integration, monitoring, SSO, and additional cyber-recovery capabilities could support increasingly distributed research.
The Takeaway: Moving Away from Isilon Doesn't Have to Mean Disrupting Your Users
The University of Waikato's experience began when it needed to replace its Isilon environment. Rather than simply buying the next generation of the same architecture, the University used the refresh to reconsider how it should purchase, administer, scale, protect, and consume enterprise file storage.
The University moved about 540 TB and 327 million files from Isilon to Qumulo while researchers continued working through familiar SMB and NFS workflows. The University made storage administration easier to distribute across the infrastructure team, built resilience across two locations, and used the HPE GreenLake model for a more flexible approach to consuming infrastructure as requirements changed.
For organizations considering moving away from Isilon, NetApp, or other platforms, the University of Waikato shows that changing the underlying storage platform doesn't have to disrupt the people and applications using the data. The migration was only the beginning. The University now has a platform that can evolve alongside its approach to research data, collaboration, lifecycle management, cloud expansion, and infrastructure.