The College of Saint Rose Passes Grade With NetApp

NetApp, Inc. announced that The College of Saint Rose has implemented NetApp and VMware virtualization solutions to tackle the challenges of data growth, availability, and reliability. Saint Rose has been able to quadruple its data availability and save an estimated $100,000 a year in hardware costs by using a combination of NetApp storage efficiency and data management technologies in their VMware virtual server environment.

Located in Albany, New York, The College of Saint Rose has about 3,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students, in addition to continuing education programs. The college was faced with a growing amount of data and number of servers and had trouble managing backup and recovery for its disjointed systems. To manage data growth, the college bought new servers and spent several weeks provisioning them. Meanwhile, storage utilization rates were only 20% to 25%. This model put a strain on the financial resources of the college and was difficult for the small staff of four administrators to manage. It was also at odds with the college’s green initiative to reduce emissions and power use.

The College of Saint Rose contacted Atec Group, an IT solutions provider and NetApp Platinum Partner, to help design and implement a better way to manage its data. Atec Group recommended NetApp storage to support a new virtualized infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. The new solution includes a NetApp FAS3000 series system in the main data center that supports Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers, Microsoft SQL Server databases via Fibre Channel, VMware and Microsoft test environments via iSCSI, and file shares via CIFS.

The benefits from moving to NetApp and VMware have been dramatic for Saint Rose, which has reduced its data center’s physical footprint and energy use by virtualizing 80 servers on 5 physical machines. NetApp thin provisioning and deduplication technology helped improve the college’s storage efficiency, increasing utilization rates by up to 85%. Now, instead of buying more storage to deal with data growth, the college simply uses reclaimed storage it already has, deferring $134,000 in hardware costs each year.

NetApp storage has also helped relieve the system administrators of many of their time-consuming processes. Previously, provisioning a new server could take months from getting a purchase order to installing the unit, and the small administration staff would then spend weeks provisioning it. Now the college’s administrators can back up, restore, and copy virtual machines in just minutes with NetApp FlexClone and Snapshot technology, delivering a huge boost to productivity and saving up to $20,000 for each new server.

"NetApp has allowed us to move our infrastructure to a point where we can easily support the needs of our students and faculty," said Alekseiv Pavlinik, senior network administrator at The College of Saint Rose. "We’ve virtually eliminated server and storage costs, grown our infrastructure while maintaining the same size staff, and can now create copies of data at will for development or backup needs."

"NetApp is committed to helping our customers remove complexity from their infrastructures with best-of-breed solutions and exceptional technology partners," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. "We’re very pleased that The College of Saint Rose achieved such great results in managing their data, increasing efficiency, and delivering services to their students. Their success was not only from our advanced storage solutions but also our network of stellar solution partners."