Colorado State University Opts for Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4000

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that Colorado State University’s Academic Computing and Networking Services (ACNS) department has integrated its storage arrays into its central computing infrastructure.

Dot Hill AssuredSAN4000 addresses the need for performance and availability storage for the software-defined storage solution.

Founded in 1870 as the Colorado Agricultural College, Colorado State University (CSU) is now among the nation’s leading research universities, with over 26,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional veterinary medicine students and 1,600 faculty members on campus. ACNS department provides central IT infrastructure with the requisite performance, stability and scalability to support students, faculty and departments. It was looking for partners to help develop strategies to manage growing data volumes and data change frequency, as well as support backup and HA/DR.

The university opted to deploy a storage virtualization platform utilizing DataCore SANsymphony-V that would support on-the-fly snapshots of all its storage for streamlined access to stored data and data recovery. But as CSU’s storage requirements grew and more critical services were moved to this platform, it soon became apparent that any addition to their existing ‘white box’ storage needed to deliver higher reliability and performance than they were experiencing while still supporting the virtualized computing environment.

The solution was found in the AssuredSAN 4000 Series arrays, a storage solution designed to deliver price performance, 99.999% availability, and streaming throughput.

“Our legacy home-grown storage system presented challenges to our growing data demands. Opting for the Dothill solution allowed us to focus our energy on something beyond troubleshooting a platform with no commercial support,” said James Cizek, Unix systems manager, Colorado State University. “Leveraging Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage arrays combined with DataCore storage virtualization appliances, we now have full replication between two sites on campus to ensure HA.“

Today ACNS’s computing environment combines Windows and Unix-based systems with FC connectivity, brought together under a common virtual storage environment. The environment includes 21 Hyper-V hosts running approximately 400 VMs, 11 VMware hosts running approximately 250 VMs, dozens of stand-alone servers for applications such as Exchange, and over 1.4PB of storage.

“Dot Hill’s customer support, dedication, and responsiveness are excellent,” said Cizek. “In my 20 years at CSU, I have never experienced the level of responsiveness and collaboration I have enjoyed with Dot Hill, DataCore and reseller Sanity Solutions, working together on our behalf. We selected this solution because we were impressed with how the Dot Hill storage and DataCore solutions complement each other.“

“Dot Hill AssuredSAN arrays are a good fit with DataCore storage virtualization appliances,” said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. “The experience at Colorado State University is another example of how Dot Hill’s rock solid and wicked fast storage arrays are ideally suited to deliver the performance and reliability needed for today’s software-defined storage solutions.“