Whitnall School
Whitnall School District goes virtual with StoreVault to deal with high investment in infrastructure
Customer Overview
The Whitnall School District (WSD) is a consortium of educational institutions, based in Village of Hales Corners that is partly in Franklin city and partly in Greenfield. WSD provides outstanding educational experience for students from Kindergarten to Grade 12.
At present, there are four schools in WSD - Edgerton Elementary, Hales Corners Elementary, Whitnall Middle School and Whitnall High School. The student population attending the four schools averages 2,500 yearly.
Customer Challenges
WSD has about 250 people and 800 computers, with 14 HP ProLiant servers. The total storage adds up to 2 TB which is mostly NAS (Iomega) and DAS. Storage was running at 65% of capacity. Veritas Backup Exec runs on a backup server, backing up all the servers’ data to the Iomega NAS device and duplicating it to an HP 448 Tape Autoloader device for long-term storage.
Storage needs kept expanding as backup data had to be retained for 7 years, instead of the previous 4 year time period. Backups, compounded with the new email archiving system, consumed tremendous amount of disk space – almost doubling the capacity requirements. The HP servers’ internal storage had already reached its maximum capacity. Iomega was also not a viable option for increased storage as it was a NAS only device, whereas SAN capability was also required to integrate with the newly-acquired VMware ESX server.
Virtual environments for server infrastructure became the new option because investmenting in new physical servers seemed expensive and time consuming. The virtual environment using VMWare ESX infrastructure was growing rapidly. However, the available disk space was limited, as it was based on the number of physical drives on the ESX server hardware. As ESX server capacity had already reached its limit, a SAN could help in expanding available storage space to store the virtual machines.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Jesse Rink, district Network Consultant at WSD, wanted increased storage space at a reasonable price and storage hardware compatibility with VMWare ESX Server. He considered using an HP AIO 1200 NAS/SAN solution, but discovered that the HP unit was not compatible with VMWare. EMC Clarion and Equallogic were not feasible options as they were not price competitive. Jesse then heard about StoreVault on the VMWare forum. The positive experiences shared on the forum about the combination of StoreVault and ESX made Jesse’s decision an easy one. Jesse opted for StoreVault with 6TB storage in 12 drives with RAID-DP and hot spare.
The StoreVault is used as both a CIFS NAS and iSCSI SAN device. NAS is strictly used as a file sharing device for additional Windows storage, while SAN is used directly with VMWare ESX server to store all the virtual machines.
The VMWare license was upgraded to the Standard Edition as the basic Starter Edition didn’t accommodate SAN Storage for virtual machines. Jesse also purchased an HP MSL 2024 tape autoloader to provide long-term data storage and archival. Server backups are now hosted in StoreVault NAS volumes and duplicated to an HP MSL 2024 Tape Autoloader device for long-term storage. Due to availability of additional storage space, virtual servers from SAN volumes can be copied to NAS volumes and further copied to tapes for disaster recovery. With the advent of StoreVault, the Iomega NAS (1TB) device became redundant put to use elsewhere within the district.
With StoreVault, WSD could expand its VMWare infrastructure remarkably. From 2 virtual servers to 7, with plans to increase it to 12, StoreVault has indeed paved the way.
Customer Experience
Jesse says “Whitnall School District has been completely satisfied with StoreVault S500. The dual functionality of having both a NAS and SAN device in one unit provides us the features we were hoping to find in a network storage device. StoreVault seamlessly integrates with our VMWare ESX infrastructure and was easy to setup.” Brian Mason from Arlington Computer Products, a VAR since 1984, facilitated the purchase and configuration process. The device was setup very promptly. Jesse adds “We had limited experience with SAN technology so we anticipated our learning curve to be quite steep. However, setup and configuration of StoreVault was easy, and StoreVault technical support was extremely helpful. I would highly recommend this device to anyone looking for SAN/NAS storage.” For Brian, availing all these benefits for $15k was a fabulous deal.
Customer Benefits
StoreVault’s capability to add and allocate space allows Whitnall School to grow its virtual server infrastructure without worries. Additionally, WSD added 5 virtual Windows servers to the ESX environment without purchasing any additional, costly, hardware. Virtual machines have also transitioned to SAN storage with no impact on performance - a fact expressed by many users.
With StoreVault, data storage at Whitnall School District is stress and problem-free.
