UK Palmer’s College Deploying Coraid Ethernet Storage

Coraid Inc., developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers worldwide, announced that Palmer’s College, a 300-year old educational establishment in Thurrock, Essex, deployed Coraid Ethernet SAN storage as part of a large datacentre virtualisation project.

With 250 staff and 2,200 students, Palmer’s College relies on data including emails, file systems, databases and images, most of it subject to data retention regulations (emails and student records must be kept for five years and old students’ work for three years) that contribute to a growth in storage requirements and management challenges.

Earlier in 2010 the college was offered an interest-free government loan towards its IT infrastructure so it decided to take the opportunity to virtualise its datacentre to save power and cooling as it had maxed out the available capacity. Such a move called for new, fast and reliable storage that offered capacity and scalability.

Network and systems developer Dan Byne and his team of five had a clear brief: the new storage would need to be affordable, easy to use, reliable and offer high performance. In addition, the new systems would need to be in place within a year to fit in with the terms of the government loan. After considering a number of options including EMC CLARiiONs and Celerras, they selected two Coraid EtherDrive SRX3200 and two EtherDrive VSX storage virtualization appliances to create a ‘no single point of failure’ system, all with 10Gb Ethernet for maximum performance.

Coraid EtherDrive storage products provide organisations of all sizes with a flexible tier of Ethernet-based storage. This consists of a new architecture that delivers scale-out performance, simplicity, and a 5-8x price-performance advantage over legacy storage.

"Our Coraid systems have curbed our needs for additional IT staff; the storage infrastructure is much easier and quicker to manage now. What took a working week before only takes a day now," said Byne. "The Ethernet appliances are very fast and the performance/cost and capacity/cost ratios are fantastic. Like most colleges, our IT budgets are very tight so we need to make every penny work as hard as possible; this is why we are considering purchasing additional Coraid systems."

"Any state academic institution is under the same pressures: to provide best-in-class service with limited funds, and for the IT department this can be a serious challenge with more and more establishments offering media-based studies that put significant strain on storage capacity and administration," commented Marcos Burnett, EMEA Sales Director, at Coraid. "On top of the above, Palmer’s College has a very large graphics department so the team needed a solution that would scale easily and cost-effectively. We were able to meet all these requirements and offer the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you can grow your data cost-effectively."