Grand Valley State University Deployed Overland’s Products

Overland Storage, Inc. announced that Grand Valley State University has deployed an economical multi-tiered data protection strategy utilizing Overland’s ULTAMUS RAID high-density SAN storage, REO SERIES disk-based backup and recovery appliances as well as NEO SERIE tape libraries. The integrated, scalable platform seamlessly safeguards 10 TBs of mission-critical data while enabling the university to better support a rapidly expanding VMware virtualization environment.

Grand Valley State is a public, four-year college located in Allendale, Michigan. Situated near Grand Rapids, the university supports more than 24,000 students along with a faculty and support staff of almost 2,000 people. The Princeton Review named GVSU one of the best universities in the Midwest in 2009 and its Seidman College of Business is known as one of the country’s top business schools.

An IT team of 40 ensures that students and faculty have ubiquitous network access and the latest tools to enrich the educational process, including SunGard’s Banner Unified Digital Campus administrative software. The technology staff also oversees 250 Microsoft Windows file servers, nearly 100 VMware virtual servers and 10 TBs of vital data. A constant influx of data along with a steady migration to server virtualization strained the university’s tape-based backup infrastructure, prompting Grand Valley to explore the addition of a cost-effective yet powerful disk-based appliance to bolster data protection.

In seeking reliable, scalable backup and recovery products to support its rapidly expanding environment, Grand Valley turned to trusted reseller partner, Mercury Storage, a Southfield, Michigan-based provider of best-of-breed data storage and security solutions. After evaluating products from several leading manufacturers, the university selected a suite of end-to-end data protection solutions from Overland Storage, including its high-capacity ULTAMUS RAID 1200 storage arrays, top-of-the-line REO 9100c disk-based backup appliances with hardware compression and enterprise-class NEO 8000 tape libraries. Together, this complementary blend of products has enabled Grand Valley State to accelerate backups and restores, extend long-term data retention and achieve heightened levels of disaster recovery and business continuity.

"With Overland’s SAN products, back up appliances and tape solutions, I no longer worry about backups or keeping up with spikes in data growth," said David Reed, network engineer for Grand Valley State University. "When our continued growth requires additional solutions, we’ll look at Overland first because we’ve come to trust their products over the years since they’ve always performed well and we’re confident the next one will too."

Grand Valley first took advantage of two NEO 8000 tape libraries for enterprise-class performance and capacity with access to as much as 1.6 petabytes of storage and space for up to 1,000 cartridges and 24 tape drives. Next, the university opted for a pair of high-end REO 9100 disk-based backup appliances to accelerate backups by more than 75 percent while enabling near-instantaneous data recoveries.

The team then added compression cards to their high-end REOs to nearly double the useable virtual tape capacity in order to keep pace with constant data growth. Two ULTAMUS SAN storage solutions complete the data protection picture by offering massive amounts of storage at the best possible price point to accommodate the university’s VMware backups.

According to Jillian Mansolf, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Overland Storage, the company’s family of backup appliances, highly available SAN and NAS solutions and tape products scale easily to support demanding requirements. "Our future-proof data protection solutions are flexible and well suited for rapid-growth environments," she explains. "Grand Valley State University is an excellent example of how Overland’s product portfolio delivers complementary capabilities for achieving faster backups and restores, more reliable long-term data retention and increased support for server virtualization migrations."