Poynette School District
Poynette goes virtual with StoreVault
Customer Overview
The K-12 School District of Poynette, located in the southern part of Wisconsin, 25 miles north of Madison, caters to over 1200 students. It has a high school, a middle school and 3 elementary schools - Poynette K-5, Arlington K-3, and Dekorra K-3.
Customer Challenges
The school district employs 125 people, and the IT environment includes 500 computers, 20 servers that are a mix of HP/Compaq Proliant 580 with 16 GB RAM, running VMware – ESX server. The Poynette school district is a thin client environment, where the IT team has established a Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server as well.
The amount of data managed was approximately 1 TB in HP internal storage. The entire storage was handled through local physical servers and was growing rapidly. An increasing number of students were saving more data, starting at a younger age, over the previous year. Data comprised of documents, pictures and multimedia content. Storage requirements have been growing at a rate of 15% annually, even though the IT team purged unnecessary data at the end of ever year.
The IT team at Poynette used Backup Exec Server and remote agents for all the backups and restore from local disks, executing full backup once in a week and differential backup everyday. A weekly full backup was also taken on an external USB drive to take offsite for disaster recovery. The traditional backup process had a large window and normally interfered with normal operation. They needed a much faster mechanism for backup and recovery.
Storage in the current setup, with local backup, was reaching 90% capacity already. Students were given limited access to computers during class hours, and the slow access to data hampered their classroom activity. More physical servers could solve this issue in the short term but was an expensive long term proposition. Additionally, ramping up the storage space through traditional SAN was also expensive.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Davy Tomlinson, IT Director of Poynette School District was responsible for finding a storage system that would offer high availability and work within his shrinking budget, quite like the other school districts in the state. A traditional SAN was $25,000 to $30,000 and remained outside his budgetary constraints. At the same time a centralized storage environment was important to take advantage of VMware completely. Mocha Data, their VAR, recommended a StoreVault appliance with iSCSI and CIFS abilities, within a smaller business price point, and Davy decided to go with it.
Davy now runs StoreVault with 8 drives and 1,859 GB of data. iSCSI is used for all database data while CIFS is used for all kinds of file sharing. His team has completely virtualized all the application servers including MetaFrame using VMWare. Poynette now runs 20 virtual servers and 2 physical servers. All of the servers’ data now resides on the StoreVault.
With a third party backup software, ESX Ranger, the IT team now captures all the running virtual machines and hardware configurations and back up to the StoreVault disk to disk backup everyday, no longer requiring remote agents. The Backup exec is now used for Exchange Server backup. They do weekly backups of all VM Images and data to an external disk and keep it off-site.
Customer Experience
Davy says “The migration from our local storage to the StoreVault system went flawlessly. We are extremely satisfied with all aspects of the transition.” Installation was quick and easy - just a couple hours. The VAR, Mocha Data, was extremely helpful through the entire process. They provided Poynette with manpower and resources to ensure a successful and smooth StoreVault installation. To top all this, the StoreVault hardware was a mere $10,951 which fit the bill as well as the requirement for small SAN.
Customer Benefits
Being a school district, one of the main goals for Davy is to keep costs down and get the maximum value possible for every dollar spent. The StoreVault has helped in keeping the storage costs down for a foreseeable period of time. Students now enjoy shorter access times to all their data in the school lab, helping them learn better. The IT team has observed that CIFS data serving is four to five times quicker than before; StoreVault’s superior cache mechanism allows faster speeds on the same LAN infrastructure. Data access is also more reliable with advanced protection architecture, and is easier to manage with a centralized StoreVault appliance.
The Poynette School District can now handle both, growing children and growing data!
