Spalding University Selects DataCore Through Mirazon Group

DataCore Software Corporation
announced that its storage hypervisor is now powering a virtualized
infrastructure – including servers, desktops and storage – supporting more than
4,500 end users at Spalding University.

spalding

Spalding University is located in downtown Louisville, Kentucky and its urban
campus has been providing academic excellence to its students for nearly 200
years.

Ezra Krumhansl, IT director at Spalding University, was looking to
increase storage capacity in response to the university’s
increasing amounts of data and to also address a critical flaw in their
SAN: Lack of redundancy/single point of
failure. The university was growing quickly and its infrastructure needed to be
updated to support this growth.

"We needed to perform
significant upgrades to our storage environment and infrastructure so that it
could support our growing school," commented Krumhansl. "In addressing our needs, including
introducing redundancy, we weighed many options from the likes of HP and Dell
to potentially replace our legacy IBM SAN. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage
hypervisor gave us the flexibility we required to perform a robust upgrade and
accomplish all of our goals, without breaking the bank. Being an institution of
higher education, we always need to do more with less, so that Spalding can
keep tuitions costs affordable to the communities we serve."

Preparing for the Exam

During the initial selection process, Spalding University considered
solutions by HP’s LeftHand and Dell’s EqualLogic to potentially replace their
existing IBM FC SAN. A major point of concern was to avoid two things: vendor
lock-in and having to perform a very costly rip-and-replace hardware upgrade in
just a few years. Krumhansl determined that Spalding University’s IBM SAN did
need to be upgraded from its 4TB capacity. It was also a single point of
failure and did not have any redundancy built in.

Krumhansl wanted failover capability – both for the purposes of DR/BC and for reasons concerning systems maintenance.

Bottom-line:
Spalding needed non-stop business operations and HA, both for the planned and
for the unplanned.

Spalding weighed its options of upgrading to a newer IBM FC SAN, or
selecting either LeftHand or EqualLogic. The upfront costs with IBM hardware
and SANsymphony-V proved lower, as were the long-term/lifetime costs of
support, renewals, etc. The real differentiator for the university was
having a software solution that was device independent, making hardware merely
a commodity.

Storage Hypervisor Makes
the Grade

Spalding University decided to stay with IBM, purchasing
IBM 3650 servers, each running SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor.

Krumhansl was able to accomplish his goals of virtualizing infrastructure and increasing storage capacity and redundancy. Spalding relied
on The Mirazon Group to put storage
virtualization software from DataCore at the heart of its IT infrastructure.
The Mirazon Group serves as an IT advisory as well
as to approximately 50 other DataCore Software customers.

Spalding’s storage infrastructure is now virtualized and supports 22TB of data. It is running 30 virtual machines on 15 physical servers. In
addition to DataCore for storage, Krumhansl uses VMware for both server and
desktop virtualization.

A co-location facility (called Peak 10), located just a mile and a
half from the university hosts both the primary and secondary mirrored systems
– thereby providing the HA required by Spalding. The university is connected to this
co-location facility through FC connectivity.

"The biggest benefit we
have realized with the DataCore storage hypervisor is replication – meaning
synchronous, real-time mirroring and the virtualization of the backend storage
environment. The data protection features definitely hit home. We don’t worry
about losing a hard drive or data because there is redundancy built in, in so
far as our having two nodes and even having redundancy within them,"
explained Krumhansl. "The
device independence also enables us to install, mix and match any server
combination we choose, allowing us to leverage, where needed, the best features
that each brand has to offer. The bottom line is that we have the freedom and
flexibility to make investments that best suit our needs, both at the time and
into the future. Regardless of whether we need an expensive, high performance
server for frequently used resources, a cheaper, lower performing one or if we
just want to re purpose and extend the viability of existing hardware, we know
the storage hypervisor can manage them all."