Universities Manage Data Growth With NetApp

While striving to provide academic excellence and support
the educational aspirations of students, colleges and universities across the
country are increasingly confronted with shrinking budgets, skyrocketing data
growth, and challenging IT environments.

In order to achieve their
educational goals, many schools, like the University
of San Diego (USD) and Art
Center College of Design, are transforming their IT infrastructures to gain
greater flexibility and efficiency with storage foundations that are built on NetApp, Inc.

University of San Diego
USD is a rigorous liberal arts school in Southern California. With 7,800
students and a sizable staff, USD previously managed IT needs with four data
centers on campus, typically adding storage capacity when necessary. However,
with an increase in high-bandwidth education applications and every-day
administrative tasks, the amount of university data exploded from 5TB to 90TB
over the course of just a couple of years. To manage its
growing data needs, USD turned to NetApp to upgrade and consolidate its
storage infrastructure, helping the school improve operational efficiencies and
gain the necessary flexibility to meet its evolving IT needs.

Another California school faced with similar data challenges is Art Center
College of Design in Pasadena. Art Center relies on a heavy computing
environment, offering data-intensive courses in film, photography, graphic
design, and many other art and design programs. Originally reliant on a
decentralized storage infrastructure, Art Center found it difficult to manage
and protect its growing data. Art Center turned to NetApp to consolidate its
storage resources into a single unified platform, allowing the college to manage its IT environment and save more than $135,000 in
additional storage costs.

USD, which worked with NetApp reseller RestorWare, built its Microsoft
applications and VMware environment on a NetApp foundation to increase IT
efficiencies, maximize storage utilization, and reduce power and cooling costs.

USD is now able to reduce the time required to replicate data volumes and
datasets for development from more than 24 hours down to just a couple of
minutes, freeing up resources to focus on other strategic projects.

Improved disaster recovery capabilities enable USD to securely store copies of
staff, faculty, and student data for quick recovery and allow USD to maintain
governance and compliance with industry regulations.

USD leverages NetApp software to
manage all storage and protocols with minimal NetApp training. The single
management framework provides the team with the flexibility to respond
to changing university demands.

Art Center College of
Design
Art Center, which worked with Colorado-based NetApp reseller Advanced Systems
Group, leverages NetApp’ storage technologies
to reduce storage costs and requirements. Thin provisioning
allows Art Center to utilize just 3.5TB of NetApp storage to manage a total
storage allocation of 27.5TB for students and faculty, saving the college more
than $90,000 in storage costs. Deduplication technology has saved the school an
additional $45,000 by reducing VMware storage requirements by 44%.

The college used to purge student data at the end of the academic year to
reclaim needed storage space. With NetApp’s ability to
reprovision storage combined with the increased efficiencies, Art Center is now
able to provide 5GB of personal storage to each student for his or her entire
time in school and 20GB to faculty members. The improved flexibility enables
the college to respond to and manage the school’s
hard-to-predict and expanding storage needs.

Art Center leverages SnapManager for Exchange and Single Mailbox Recovery to
enhance the college’s e-mail availability. As a result, recovering a mailbox,
which used to take as much as 2 hours, now takes just 45 minutes, getting staff
and faculty back online faster for improved productivity.

Christopher Wessells, vice provost and chief intelligence officer, University
of San Diego
said: "USD is committed to providing our students, faculty, and staff with the
best educational resources and learning tools, and our IT infrastructure is
fundamental to making this a reality. Moving to a NetApp foundation has
provided us with incredible efficiencies to help us reduce costs and get far
more out of our storage infrastructure than we did in the past. Additionally,
the improved flexibility has enabled us to seamlessly manage our exponential
data growth without having to add additional staff, allowing us to optimize
resources and apply more focus to organizational innovation."

Jason Blackader, UNIX system administrator, Art Center College of Design said: "Art Center provides learning programs to
students that require extreme amounts of data that places an incredible strain
on our IT environment. As a result we needed a storage infrastructure that
could support this growing demand and enable us to deliver the most innovative
services to our students. NetApp has given us everything we need in a single
platform, helping us dramatically cut costs and more effectively support the
educational aspirations of our students."

Regina Kunkle, vice president of State and Local Government and Higher
Education (SLED), NetApp said: "USD
and Art Center are both great examples of how the right IT infrastructure can
further a school’s educational objective by reducing costs and effectively
managing the massive increase in data and information that is created on a
daily basis. NetApp has long partnered with universities and colleges
throughout the country to help them navigate these unique challenges, and we
are committed to continuing to provide the most innovative solutions to enable
them to thrive in the future."