Danish Syddansk Erhvervsskole Technical College Upgrades to Tintri AFA

Syddansk Erhvervsskole is the largest technical college system in Denmark, with around 5,300 students and more than 870 employees.

Erhvervsskolernes IT Samarbejde (ESIS) is an IT department for the vocational college system in Denmark. It is part of an IT cooperation between eight of Denmark’s technical colleges, providing back office support to local IT staff and supporting all network-related configurations. ESIS hosts all servers and routes their Internet through its main data centre in Odense, Denmark.

ESIS found its Dell EqualLogic storage systems were struggling to deliver the required performance as it virtualised more and more servers in its data centre using VMware. They also required too much maintenance.

After deciding not to continue investing in EqualLogic, ESIS considered a number of options, including Nexenta, Oracle, EMC and NetApp, but opted for Tintri, Inc. because it was the only solution designed for virtual environments. ESIS ran a PoC with two boxes so it could replicate all the data off-site while testing the production environment. The Tintri systems surpassed its expectations.

When it came to installing the Tintri appliance, it was easy to get up and running. ESIS booted it up, gave it an IP address, connected to the VMware hosts and started migrating everything over. The entire environment was up and running in 30 minutes.

After three years with Tintri, ESIS had to choose between extending the four-year maintenance deal on its existing appliance for an additional year or buying a new all flash Tintri box.

“The choice was easy since we had already been looking at going all-flash for more performance and space,” says Sebastian Kim Morsony, IT architect and system consultant, ESIS.

In addition, all-flash has deduplication support.

The EC6000 series delivers all-flash performance for up to 7,500 virtualised applications in two rack units. The storage file system built specifically for virtualised and cloud workloads controls each application automatically and helps match capacity to business needs one drive at a time. It gives ESIS visibility of latency across every application in the data centre. ESIS is still using its previous Tintri solution but plans to migrate all workloads to the all flash system in the near future.

“It’s the perfect fit,” Morsony says. “It has the same management as the previous system and the same way of doing things. Everybody not using Tintri is doing storage the wrong way.“

Before moving to Tintri, the college’s users were frustrated with poor application performance.

“Everything was lagging and exhibiting very high latency,” says Morsony. Tintri delivered a significant increase in performance and capacity. “It has performed perfectly and surpassed the Dell EqualLogic platform by many lengths.“

Ease of deployment and management
Under the old system it took hours to spin up and tear down applications. With Tintri, it takes seconds. In addition, the whole team can manage Tintri and use it for quick cloning and recovery services, compared to a limited number of staff who could do those tasks with EqualLogic storage. Anyone in the data centre is able to manage their own storage footprint. According to Morsony, Tintri requires almost no management.

Better visibility
Tintri provides complete visibility of latency in every application in the data centre and the ability to see across the infrastructure in real-time. It has simplified troubleshooting across the host, the network and storage.

Reduced footprint and power
By moving from the Dell environment to Tintri, Syddansk Erhvervsskole reduced its data centre footprint and power by replacing five Dell EqualLogic boxes with a single Tintri box, achieving a five to one reduction in footprint and power costs.

Case study