EDmin Deploying D-Series SAN from NEC

NEC Corporation of America announced that EDmin has deployed NEC’s D-Series SAN Storage to save money, improve reliability and performance, and cost-effectively scale to support company growth and new applications.

EDmin is a provider of learning management solutions that enable school districts and teachers to accelerate student learning, and improve performance. To deliver their SaaS offering to school districts throughout the U.S., EDmin runs multiple applications that acquire data from tests and provide reporting functionality. Data from over 60 school districts serving from 10,000 to 300,000 students and teachers reside in data centers in San Diego and Irvine, Calif., as well as in Dallas, Texas.

EDmin had two top IT initiatives. They were rolling out a cutting-edge new service based on a recently-acquired, student-testing application and needed the higher storage capacities and performance associated with the Web-based solution. They also wanted to consolidate multiple data centers into a single facility in San Diego. They considered SAN storage systems from NEC, EMC, and Dell.

“We weren’t just looking at raw storage versus raw storage. It was the number of spindles, the amount of storage and extra features such as the ability to multi-path, and we also compared whether or not features were standard or if we had to pay for each as an option,” said Mike Bours, chief information technology officer, EDmin. “Take multi-pathing for example – it’s included as part of the NEC base price and an add-on with EMC.”

EDmin needed high availability with no single point of failure down to the host level, without exception. They needed a highly scalable system to accommodate growth and a minimum number of spindles to maintain application performance. The company also compared space requirements, energy use and total cost of ownership. “The reduced footprint in the data center with NEC was another positive factor. By choosing NEC we were not only looking at lower recurring cabinet costs per month but also reduced power,” continued Bours. “While we did compare the basic costs – and NEC won on that comparison alone – when we looked at the whole package, NEC came out far ahead of the competition.”

Ultimately, EDmin selected the NEC D-Series over the other brands for their new, consolidated data center.

Since deploying NEC’s SAN storage solution, EDmin is now using fewer hard drives, achieving higher storage capacities and experiencing better performance. The company is also seeing data center savings with a 70 percent drop in power usage and a 70 percent reduction in cabinet space due to NEC’s D-Series’ power saving features and smaller system footprint.

“EDmin required a storage solution that would be dependable, scalable and efficient,” said Josh Eddy, product marketing manager for NEC Corporation of America’s Advanced Storage Products Group. “With NEC’s D-Series SAN storage, EDmin was able to consolidate multiple data centers into one, optimize performance and experiencing significant cost savings. NEC is committed to our customers. We don’t know of any other storage vendors who stand behind their product offerings like we do. We will continue to provide quality solutions at affordable prices.”

NEC’s D-Series SAN Storage arrays provide efficient and highly available, enterprise SAN storage without sacrificing performance, flexibility, or scalability. NEC’s D-Series SAN Storage scales non-disruptively up to 1.5 PB. In addition, NEC D-Series is fully redundant, provides cache continuity, offers virtual storage partitioning for Quality of Service (QoS), features NEC’s patented Phoenix self-healing technology, and protects from silent data corruption to ensure data integrity and availability. The NEC D-Series also offers power management for hard disk drives as well as the ability to intermix SAS and SATA drives for greater efficiency.

NEC’s D-Series SAN storage solution is part of NEC’s Dynamic IT Infrastructure that includes servers, storage, virtual desktop solutions, and system software, which are smart, flexible, adaptive to change, scalable, resilient, and continuously evolving. Along with NEC’s broad range of services, the NEC Dynamic IT Infrastructure provides an ideal platform for virtualization, consolidation and business continuity and is ideal for driving greater value and efficiencies in solutions for physical security, law enforcement, emergency response, travel and entertainment, education, high performance computing, and business. This type of infrastructure allows IT organizations to move forward confidently and meet changing and growing business needs in an efficient manner.