USC Marshall School of Business Virtualizes With Xiotech

Xiotech Corporation today announced that the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business is moving to its next generation of storage with its purchase of Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 storage area network (SAN) solution.

The school selected the Emprise 7000 storage system, powered by patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, to increase network performance and improve storage management in a virtualized IT environment as the school transitions to a 100 percent virtual server infrastructure.

The USC Marshall School of Business, located in Los Angeles, is a nationally recognized leader in business education. It has an annual enrollment of more than 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students and offers more than 12 programs of study, including a doctoral program.

The school wanted a storage system that would give it the freedom to build on its IT infrastructure over the next six years. Currently in progress toward becoming 100 percent virtualized, it needed a storage system that could scale effortlessly with no performance loss or availability risk.

"When our IT environment is fully virtualized, we plan to have 110 virtual machines running on 6 servers. So, for us, a successful transition hinged on the ability to remove the I/O bottlenecks found in traditional storage systems," said the USC Marshall School of Business’s Network Services Manager Dan Lewis. "With Emprise 7000 we’ll be able to eliminate those bottlenecks and expect to see a 200 percent increase in performance."

Beyond improving the performance of its network infrastructure, USC Marshall School of Business recognized that managing storage for hundreds of virtual machines could be a daunting task. To reduce complexity, the business school sought an automated storage management solution that would work cohesively with its virtual infrastructure.

"We identified right away that Xiotech’s ICON Manager user interface with its Virtual View feature was what we were looking for," said Lewis. "Virtual View integrates with our virtual environment and automates much of the storage provisioning and management for our virtual machines. Now we can assign and manage storage in just a few steps, saving us precious time and reducing the risk of errors."

Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 storage system eliminates virtually all disk- related service events through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. 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.

The Emprise 7000 system supports up to 64 ISE (1,024 terabytes) and is managed by dual, clustered storage controllers. It includes all of the capabilities that are currently available on Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 4000 line, including the Web Services-based ICON Manager user interface, optimal storage virtualization, distributed cluster architecture, Intelligent Provisioning and a suite of data replication solutions.