St. John's Prep
StoreVault with VMware provides complete virtualization solution to
St. John’s Preparatory School
Customer Overview
Founded in 1907, St. John’s is a Catholic, independent, secondary school for young men sponsored by the Xaverian Brothers. Located at a 175-acre campus, 15 miles northeast of Boston, Massachusetts, St. John’s Preparatory School accommodates 1,250 students from 90 communities in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Customer Challenges
Of the 500 computers that the school’s IT team has established, 60% are desktops, while the rest 40% are laptops, serving the 150 employees and enrolled students.
The school had 12 servers - 4U and 5U rackmount “white-box” servers with Intel motherboards and CPUs and these servers managed 1.5 TB of storage as direct attached storage. The school’s numerous applications ran on different servers—the MS Exchange 2003 ran on one, MS SQL 2000 on another, IIS 6 on a third while Veritas Backup Exec and a number of other services functioned on the remaining servers. Backups were performed from disk to disk to tape daily using an Ultrium LTO2 tape library and sent offsite once a month.
The school had leased all of its servers; and the number of servers coming off lease every year was different. The challenge was to create a balance in the usage of these servers. For instance, a couple of these servers were running at just 20% utilization, while others were at 90% utilization. During any storage migration, services had to move along with data to other servers. Moreover, the servers were leased at different times leading to hardware incompatibility, and significant downtime when the leased devices were brought online.
New servers or services were added consistently for the last three years. This meant either overloading the existing server with services or finding more money, power, and cooling for another physical server in the “already crowded” server room. Each server was running multiple applications now – up to 4 applications in some instances. For instance, Active Directory domain controller also ran DHCP & DNS server, print server and hosted library card catalog server. To upgrade and install a patch on one application required shutting down other applications as well.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Christopher Butler, the Academic Technology Director at St John’s did not want to replace existing servers with seven new servers only to face the same storage crunch a few years later. After reading a couple of vendor-neutral tutorials from Greenpage Inc, Chris realized that he needed iSCSI SAN and server virtualization for more flexibility.
He looked into EqualLogic PS series SAN and the AX150i SAN from EMC. The former was very expensive and the latter could take only eight snapshots per LUN. StoreVault solution was the perfect match with high-end features at a lower price point.
He could solve his problems by purchasing one StoreVault S500 SAN and only three 2U HP physical servers as opposed to using seven physical servers. S500 has twelve 500GB drives, RAID-DP, both NICs connected to an HP GigE (2824) switch with all connections to S500 via iSCSI.
One server is a dedicated backup server attached to an HP Ultrium LTO2 tape library and S500. The other two are clustered and run VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3.0.1 connecting to the same shared 1TB VMFS LUN on the S500. They host nine Windows 2003 R2 servers and only 1 Debian server. The HP Procurve GigE switch is carved into two VLANs, one for the iSCSI network connection the HP servers to the S500 and one for GigE ports for the core VLAN.All applications services run on separate servers providing easy upgrade and installation.
Customer Experience
Chris says, “I spent months researching all the major players in the iSCSI SAN market and I kept coming back to the StoreVault S500. Everyone kept trying to sell me on the EqualLogic boxes because of their features or on the EMC AX150i because of its low cost. But, the only solution that properly balanced features with affordability was the StoreVault S500.”
Greenpages, Inc. was exemplary in suggesting virtualization and providing support with both the SAN and the VMWare virtualization software. They sent engineers on-site to help with install of the S500 and VMWare.
Now, deploying a new virtual server takes less than 30 minutes and does not cost a penny. VMWare software can move virtual servers between two physical servers with no interruptions in service. Additionally, with fewer physical servers drawing power, St John’s survived a 45-minute power outage with no downtime on the virtual environment.
Customer Benefits
St John’s school has upgraded server storage twice, taking less than 5 minutes to add the space to StoreVault S500 volume.The winning points for StoreVault over the competition include the features like 255 snapshots per LUN, RAID DP, ability to add and allocate space on the fly, and lower business price point.
St. John’s IT environment is all smiles with StoreVault, just like its students.
