Long Beach Unified School District Purchased a 26TB Xiotech Emprise 7000

Xiotech Corporation announced the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) purchased an Emprise 7000 storage system to manage all of the district’s critical applications, including human resources, financial and student information. The school district selected the Emprise system, powered by patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, for its tight integration with virtualized IT environments and its strong performance capabilities.

LBUSD is the third-largest school district in California, and in the top 30 nationwide by size. The district educates nearly 90,000 students in 93 public schools in the cities of Long Beach, Lakewood, Signal Hill and Avalon on Catalina Island. Established in 1885 with fewer than a dozen students, LBUSD has earned the reputation as one of America’s finest school systems today, winning many awards as a national model of excellence. The district has more than 13,000 employees.

The California school district purchased a Magnitude storage system from Xiotech in 2000, and while the system had worked well for more than eight years, it was time for LBUSD to upgrade its IT infrastructure. Data growth was the primary driver for the district’s purchase, particularly with the State of California requiring school districts to hold student records for 11 years following graduation, and pending legislation around document retention.

LBUSD decided to consolidate its servers through virtualization, which would be supported by a storage system that could scale up to at least 40 terabytes if needed while providing automated storage management within a virtualized server environment.

"Emprise 7000 offered us incredibly tight integration and customization within a virtual environment," said Matt Woods, administrator, Information and Technology Systems, LBUSD. "Xiotech’s new Virtual View plug-in feature reports storage allocation not only for the array, but also for the physical servers and virtual machine environments. With Virtual View we will be able to reduce the number of steps it takes us to provision storage from dozens to just a few steps, and all from one console. This will save us time, reduce risks and help us make better decisions for storage management."

The performance of Emprise 7000 along with the five-year hardware warranty and reduced total cost of ownership also were key selling points for LBUSD. As a public school district, budgets are prioritized for student-focused initiatives, so enterprise technology purchases are made only when necessary and must be made for long-term benefit.

"Emprise 7000 will give us performance equal to other vendors’ high-end data storage systems at half the cost," added Woods. "Plus, once you add in the five-year hardware warranty, we’re saving even more."

LBUSD purchased a 25.6 terabyte Emprise 7000 system and has already successfully implemented all of its financial, human resources and student information system (SIS) data on the new system.

The Emprise 7000 system supports up to 64 ISE (1,024 terabytes) and is managed by dual controllers. It includes all of the storage capabilities that are currently available on Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 4000 line, including the Web services-based ICON Manager interface with Virtual View for managing virtualized environments, a distributed cluster architecture, intelligent provisioning and a suite of data replication solutions.

Xiotech’s Emprise storage systems are built on patented ISE technology, which eliminates virtually all disk-related service events, through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. This means customers never have to worry about drive failures — a commitment Xiotech backs with a five-year hardware warranty. ISE technology also overcomes performance issues of traditional data storage systems by tightly integrating drive, enclosure and controller software, and by distributing much of the processing and cache into the enclosure. And ISE technology provides greatly improved and simplified scalability by pooling storage into a singular element that is 20 to 40 times the capacity of a typical disk drive, with the internal processing power and cache needed to handle all drive management functions.