Northshore School District Chooses ExaStore
To provide network storage support to 3,000 concurrent users
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on November 21, 2008 at 3:08 pmThe Northshore School District (NSD), located in the Seattle metropolitan area, has chosen ExaStore Clustered NAS 2008 to provide file services to almost 3,000 staff and 20,000 students in 33 buildings covering an area of 60 square miles.
The NSD IT team supports Mac, Windows, Linux, and Sun machines across its single network and chose ExaStore because it was the only scalable system that could support AFP, CIFS, and NFS protocols.
“ExaStore’s ability to share the same directory via various protocols along with the ability to use Unix links to make directories appear in multiple locations was what sold the system to us,” says Ski Kacoroski, Unix System Administrator. “ExaStore’s single namespace and heterogeneous protocol support lets staff and students easily access their files from Mac or Windows clients."
“For example, ExaStore’s Unix links allow us to have a single class directory show up in the home folders of the teacher and students of a single class,” continues Ski. “This allows teachers to easily share materials with students and the students to turn in work electronically to the teachers. Because we create links directly from the student records database, when students change classes, they immediately see the new class in their home folder like magic.”
ExaStore Clustered NAS is a high-performance, scalable solution that changes the economics of storage with a clustered distributed file system. With ExaStore, NSD system administrators can expand capacity and performance as needed, when needed, without affecting applications or users. ExaStore provides NSD with campus-wide file services using a single scalable storage system, requiring minimal storage administration.
“It has simplified our IT processes, allowing our team to provide new and better services such as allowing staff to easily post files to the web by sharing out a directory to an Apache web server via NFS and to staff via CIFS and AFP,” concludes Ski. “In addition, ExaStore’s ability to quickly and easily grow a volume’s size has saved me more than once as our storage needs have increased.”
Part of the standard ExaStore installation, ExaAdmin, a web-based console and command-line interface (CLI), offers centralized configuration, management and monitoring of the ExaStore clustered storage solution from a single point. It supports the standard SNMP protocol, and a custom SNMP MIB file provides monitoring for the cluster status, file system performance and protocol information.
“While not a ‘traditional enterprise’ user, NSD’s use of ExaStore highlights its flexibility across systems without any related administrative hassles, thanks to its easy-to-use management interface,” says Lior Gal, Exanet’s Vice President, Sales, West Coast. “In addition, the system is being used by everyone from school children to senior administrators, which clearly demonstrates how seamless ExaStore appears to the end user.”