South Country School District
A Study in Storage: K12 Storage Consolidation and Backup
Introduction
South Country School District encompasses six schools and administrative offices spread over 16 square miles of Long Island, NY. The district serves approximately 6,000 students, faculty members, and administrators. The district has a history of using data in teaching and administration to enable improved performance in the classroom.
The Environment
The infrastructure for the district supports around 2,000 computers and 23 Dell servers. The district supports a growing intranet, an external Web site, an Exchange server for e-mail, and a number of proprietary financial and student management applications. Storage servers are set up by grade level for students and for teaching and administrative staff. Remote classrooms and sites are connected via a district-wide WAN.
The Challenge
Three key issues faced the district: the number of servers was becoming a management problem; the servers were nearing the end of their useful life; and the backup window was becoming unmanageable. With 13 storage servers, a constant stream of updates and patches needed to be applied. Storage on some servers was underutilized while other servers were filled to capacity; the only way to add storage was to back up, take down the server, add drives, and rebuild again‹so much for no work at schools at weekends! The backup window was getting to the point of taking more time than was available. With more users becoming dependent on the network, the backup window was shrinking while the amount of data was growing, increasing the time taken to back up. The district now has 1.6TB of managed storage.
The Solution
Dr. Timothy Regan, technology director for the district, called Kevin Urso of Connected Technology, LLC, a VAR based in Long Island, NY, to evaluate potential solutions. Together they looked at upgrading/replacing all the existing servers and at networked storage alternatives.
Replacing all the storage servers would improve performance and add space, but the district would just be delaying further upgrades in capacity and server replacement would do nothing to help from a management perspective.
The SAN solutions were attractive because they could deliver future expandability and better utilization of the storage purchased, but the costs of Fibre Channel were prohibitive.
It quickly became obvious that all of the district¹s storage issues could be resolved with the StoreVault S500. Storage could be dynamically allocated to user groups as required without disruption; it provided both NAS and iSCSI SAN connectivity out of the box, therefore consolidating aging servers and reducing management costs; and the NetApp Snapshot technology would dramatically improve the backup process. The district was able to move to SAN/NAS technology for about 50% of the cost of implementing a Fibre Channel SAN.
Dr. Susan A. Agruso, superintendent of schools for the district, said, In addition to providing access to information throughout the campuses, we help teachers tailor their classroom instruction by providing real-time access to individual student achievement data. But while we see technology as a critical component of the teaching process, funding is always a challenge and we need to invest in solutions that give real value for money. This solution meets our needs now and will allow us to continue to grow.
Connected Technology¹s Urso summed it up: ³We pride ourselves on being able to match the right technology to the right application. By utilizing the iSCSI technology the district was able to leverage its past technology investment. This greatly reduced the cost to move into SAN technology. Also, since the StoreVault S500 supports NAS (NFS and CIFS), iSCSI, and even Fibre Channel, the school district has many options moving forward.
Benefits
- Consolidation of 13 storage servers to 6 and the StoreVault S500
Price point: able to implement NAS and iSCSI SAN technology in the
existing infrastructure for approximately 50% of the cost of Dell/EMC
SAN solution - Flexible storage: by utilizing a SAN, the district will be able to easily expand, allocate, and reallocate storage on the fly, making better use of purchased storage space
- Disk-to-disk backups: the StoreVault S500 has NetApp Snapshot technology built in, enabling instantaneous backups of data; currently backups are taking upwards of 16 hours a night
- Tape backup can now be done at any time and backups can now be used
for off-site disaster recovery purposes; restoring data can be done
from disk, eliminating lengthy and unreliable restoration from tape - Increased storage capacity: the district currently has 1.6TB of storage; the StoreVault S500 provides room to grow‹without disruption
- Redundancy: the StoreVault S500 was configured with dual parity hard
drives (RAID-DP) to protect against two concurrent disk drive failures
and a global hot spare enables background rebuilds without administrator intervention
