Sanrad V-Stor SAN Supports Millfield School

Millfield School, a private academy, upgraded its SAN system to SANRAD’s V-STOR to meet the ever-expanding demands placed on its storage network and to gain peace of mind by using the metro cluster synchronous high-availability feature.

“The inefficient storage capacity and low availability and complexity of our existing SAN simply did not have the ability to meet the needs of students and staff,” says James Farwell, Network Manager, Millfield School. “We also wanted to guarantee availability of critical services. The SANRAD V-STOR storage virtualization architecture has made a significant difference as it has improved performance and sped up the process of allocating storage. School IT staff are confident the new system will easily scale to meet future needs as storage demands increase.”
 
Deploying a clustered pair of SANRAD V-STOR storage arrays, Millfield is benefiting from SANRAD’s tight integration with Windows 2008 Failover Clustering. The metro cluster set-up replicates data to two separate V-STORs via Fibre Channel simultaneously. This results in a dual-path synchronized configuration creating mirrored volumes and better load balancing and providing an infrastructure with no single point of failure. In the event of disaster, this assures both high availability and continuity, even as many students access large files simultaneously.
 
An educational institution of Millfield’s size would normally face storage challenges. Its demands are even more profound given its progressive leanings – more and more of students’ work is completed online, and they are creating an ever-increasing amount of media projects, including podcasts, videos and music. With SANRAD’s metro cluster in place, it ensures that the students’ work will never be lost.  
 
“Our V-STOR SAN easily overcame the many challenges posed by Millfield’s dilemmas,” states Oded Ilan, CEO, SANRAD. “We exceeded the original objectives, came within the allocated budget and reduced operational costs. Now, students can go about devising original, creative projects, and the IT team members can rest assured that even if they experience a disaster, they will have zero data loss and zero down time.”