Mott Community College Replaces 100TB SAN With DataON Storage

Mott Community College wanted to replace 100TB of existing SAN storage, but needed a fast, affordable, HA solution that supported Enterprise Storage OS (ESOS), which is open source software that allows a server to appear as a storage appliance.

Like many organizations, the college was challenged with a growing number of production VMware servers and the realization that their existing SAN storage was simply not able to deliver the performance their users required. They needed a solution that could deliver faster access, maintain HA and stay within their limited budget.

The combination of Avago Syncro CS controllers and DataON Storage scalable enclosures was able to meet these requirements. The solution includes, standard commodity servers with Syncro CS 9286-8e controllers configured in active-active clusters connected to eight 2U, 24-bay small form factor DataON DNS-1640 SAS enclosures.

“Now that Avago Syncro CS controllers are available, this is really THE solution for a dual-head ESOS storage server,” – remarks Marc Smith, manager of computing services, Mott Community College.

The college replaced its entire 100TB storage environment with an affordable, HA shared storage system that met its performance requirements and provided substantial savings in both hardware and support costs. By using the combination of Syncro CS controllers and DataON enclosures, it opted for a combination of 10K SAS drives and SSDs configured in RAID-10. This implementation enabled them to achieve over 346,000 1KB read IO/s and provide both the fast throughput and the HA that their VMFS datastores needed. It also saved over $50,000 a year in support costs over their old SAN solution.

“We’ve been using ESOS, Avago and DataON products for our VMware VMFS datastores on FC SANs for quite a while now. It’s been rock-solid and that has driven us to replace all our storage with an open storage solution,” said Smith.