Virginia Military Institute
Oldest State Military College Marches On With Expanded Storage Capacity
Customer Overview
The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia, was
founded in 1839 and is the oldest state military college in the
United States. The VMI accepts only high school graduates as
cadets and unlike other state “military colleges” in the country,
offers no civilian degree programs at the Institute. The VMI
is a Spartan, physically demanding environment, enforcing
strict military discipline and nicknamed the “West Point of the
South.”
The VMI’s academic studies fall into four broad categories: Engineering, Liberal Arts, Science, and Leadership. Within these four categories, 14 major and 22 minor streams of specialization are offered to cadets. Nearly all of the VMI faculty holds doctoral degrees in various subjects of research and specialization. Over 97% of VMI graduates find opportunities in the military, or are admitted to graduate and professional schools within months of graduation.
Customer Challenges
The VMI employs 500 faculty and administrative personnel and
runs over a thousand client systems supported by 32 servers
serving nearly 2TB of data. Prior to discovering StoreVault, the
IT department was using two Dell 4400/4600 servers accessing
1.6TB each on an EMC SAN for Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange
data. Symantec Backup Exec moved data to Overland Data LTO-3
and DLT tape libraries weekly, and tapes were rotated offsite for
archive every six months. VMI produced as many as six DLT and
two LTO-3 tapes every week.
Recently, enrollment had increased, resulting in several strains on the IT setup. Exploding user data added 150 GB to the SAN each year and despite a regular purge, capacity was growing by over 4X annually, The user space on the FC SAN was reaching nearly 90% utilization and allocating more storage for user data was not an easy option. Upgrading the existing FC SAN was estimated to cost at least $60,000 per switch, and the system could still only support 140GB drives.
Customer Solution
Jef McCreery, the Enterprise Server Administrator at the VMI, saw several tasks ahead. First,
consolidating 32 physical servers spread over distributed data centers and reducing management. Secondly, providing low cost, scalable storage apart from his existing Fibre Channel SAN. And
finally, reducing or eliminating tape backup.
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During his research, Jef read positive reviews of iSCSI technology used to create lower cost SANs and discovered that server virtualization technology could reduce his management challenge. After reviewing options from NetApp, LeftHand Networks, Intransa, and Dell/EMC, StoreVault
reseller Scott Dean at FedTek suggested the StoreVault S500, which Jef found a tremendous
value for the money. Features like Snapshot technology and StoreVault Replication software
were attractive as was the StoreVault’s seamless integration with VMware for server and storage
consolidation. VMI has now replaced two aging Dell 4400/4600 servers with a Sun Fire x4600
server. This host runs two VMware virtual machines connected to a StoreVault iSCSI SAN. User
data has been centralized on StoreVault NAS volumes with Robocopy and the existing FC SAN
hosts now have additional, separate iSCSI LUNs on the StoreVault. Data is still backed up across
this entire scheme using Backup Exec to an Overland tape library. The existing FC SAN is still used
for high transaction applications like Microsoft Exchange, but the StoreVault S500 has made
several terabytes of new space available.
Customer Experience
Jef spent just over $14,700 for his StoreVault instead of $70,000 to upgrade the FC SAN. Further,
he says “We had this system up and usable (for testing) within a couple of hours of receiving the
unit. It is very easy to carve out a LUN and present the storage to a server; I would say the whole
process takes about 2 minutes. Expanding a LUN is equally simple making managing our server
storage less of a headache and I can take an existing LUN and present it to a different server in
seconds. I also like the proactive monitoring features for reliability.”
Customer Benefits
Jef boasts that VMI users have not even noticed that they are no longer using FC SAN. “I honestly
didn’t expect iSCSI to perform as well as it does.” Today VMI is storing 1TB of file share data and
running multiple virtual machines on a single S500, at 85% utilization.
In the future, Jef plans to leverage the features of LUN snapshot copies and replication so that
he does not have to back up tapes offsite. His eventual goal is to eliminate the offsite backup
process completely. He also plans to increase the number of virtual machines in his Sun servers,
and thus replace the remaining Dell host servers.
For the Virginia Military Institute, the StoreVault is exactly the reinforcement they needed to
fight their storage capacity battles.
