Limerick Institute of Technology Chooses Coraid

Coraid Inc. has been selected by the Limerick
Institute of Technology (LIT)
to improve its capability to handle data growth.

One of 13 members of the Institutes of Technology Ireland (IOTI), LIT has over 6,000 full-time students
attending art and design, engineering and IT, business and humanities courses
across its seven locations. To support these seven sites LIT relies on
approximately 80 physical and 70 virtualised servers and a FC SAN.

In 2010, as LIT’s storage requirements started to exceed 160TB, with
anticipated growth at 15% a year, LIT’s IT team decided to identify a scalable
storage platform that could handle the forecasted increases in data volume. The institute wanted a flexible, performance and cost-efficient
solution that could support the various applications used by different
departments, some more I/O intensive than others.

As LIT planned to develop a private cloud, the IT team reviewed options
offering enhanced integration between the underlying storage layer, its
increasingly virtualised server estate and its future cloud-based environment.

Joe O’Gorman, technical officer, ,Limerick Institute of Technology,
explained: "As early IT adopters and
a public sector organisation we wanted to get the most functionality and
highest performance at the best price. After evaluating our options we came to
the conclusion that Coraid was a clear winner offering flexibility and ease of
management at around 50% less than the cost of extending our existing SAN. Not
only this but Coraid’s Ethernet storage allows us to easily mix and match SATA,
SAS and SSD drives which fitted in with our plans to develop our own cloud."

LIT initially installed a 13TB Coraid solution consisting of an SRX3200 array
using 600GB SAS disks. After proving its reliability and flexibility as well as
cost-effectiveness, LIT’s IT team scaled the system up with SRX2800 arrays,
deploying over 106TB of storage on Coraid but at the same time plugging
directly into LIT’s Microsoft applications including Exchange and SQL.

O’Gorman added: "The system has
easily met all our criteria in terms of reliability and performance. The
platform runs in a HA configuration which has offered 100% reliability for the
last 24 months. Our decision to become an early adopter of Ethernet SAN has
paid off in every way."

The Coraid EtherDrive SRX series provides the foundation for the EtherDrive
storage range by providing low-latency, high-bandwidth data transfer between
hosts and data on the network. Each SRX runs the CorOS distributed storage OS
to pool individual building blocks together into a single platform.

Pete Godden, VP of EMEA, Coraid said: "Coraid’s storage arrays are designed to be easy to operate and meet the
high performance and scalability needed by organisations such as LIT that
require their storage systems to be up and running 24/7. Also, as more and more
organisations including LIT virtualise their environments our scale-out
Ethernet SAN architecture is ideally suited to take them through this process.
We’re a dynamic company committed to bringing to the table new and disruptive technologies
that will help our customers best develop their storage strategies for the
future."