California Polytechnic State University Deploys Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array

Zadara Storage Ltd announced that California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), a public university with a strong engineering and science focus, made its On Premise as a Service (OPaaS) private cloud storage solution the centerpiece of its move from a cost center to an IT-service provider model in serving its colleges and departments.

By replacing its NetApp storage array with the Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) located on its premises and behind its firewall, Cal Poly solved numerous management, scalability and performance issues – and gained a primary storage solution that keeps the storage within its data center, while still enjoying all the benefits of cloud pricing. By changing the way it thinks about storage, Cal Poly also eliminated the 3- to 5-year purchase-manage-refresh cycles of traditional storage, and assured it stays within its Operating Expense (OpEx) budget quarter after quarter.

Cal Poly’s single NetApp array was causing an I/O storm impacting everyone’s performance, as the mixed workloads it supported caused the classic ‘noisy neighbor’ issue. The array was complex and difficult to manage, causing delays in responding to departmental requests for storage capacity. With the NetApp array’s expiring warranties and functional limitations – on top of very limited OpEx budgets – Cal Poly’s IT services group knew it needed to make some serious changes, but wasn’t sure they had any options. After evaluating over 20 storage vendors including EMC Corporation, Dell, Inc. and Amazon S3, Cal Poly chose Zadara as it faced a 5-year budget lock that kept it from purchasing CapEx infrastructure.

“Storage-as-a-service has enabled us to create an infrastructure that is evergreen and will not need to be ripped and replaced in a few years. Zadara helped us rethink how we can deploy storage and offer self-service deployment options to departments within the university,” said Tim Schmidt, engineering services manager, Cal Poly. “The Zadara VPSA gives us the scalability and elasticity we need to scale up, and also to scale down – as the campuses do during semester breaks. We enjoy the economic benefits of a multi-tenant array, but maintain the performance isolation as if every department had its own storage. Zadara fit around our IT requirements, not the other way around.“

“The benefits of software-defined data centers have been proven in corporations of every size. The fundamental tenets of elastic resources that adapt to your needs and the ability to pay only for the resources used, translate into material savings and departmental agility. Zadara is helping enterprises and academic institutions such as Cal Poly deploy storage as a service and enjoy these benefits,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO, Zadara. “Traditional storage arrays have fixed limitations that waste both human and capital resources. We are delighted to help Cal Poly’s IT team serve its internal customers with an infrastructure that’s as innovative as the work its scientists and professors create.“

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