Infortrend

Looking to revamp the manner in which data was being backed up, the Oakley Union Elementary School District in California commenced a search for a storage solution that was centralized, simple to manage, capable of creating duplicates of data backups, and priced to meet budget criteria.

After a thorough vetting of available offerings, the district, led by Director of Technology Jay Dunn, selected the ESVA iSCSI-host storage solution from Infortrend Technology Inc., a provider of network storage offerings. The Infortrend ESVA solution is connected to the school servers through a dedicated 1GbE iSCSI switch. Data from all servers can now be directly backed up on the ESVA solution through this SAN (Storage Area Network) configuration.

The Oakley Union Elementary School District in California provides quality education to students within the district boundaries. With seven different school sites located throughout the city of Oakley, the district handles large amounts of data, which needs to be securely protected in order to preserve student records and other vital information. Achieving efficient data backup for all of this vital school data is a challenge that the district had been meeting through the use of a complicated configuration that created backups of server data, making the central management of backups difficult and costing the district a considerable amount in terms of time allocated and money spent.

According to Thomas Kao, director of product planning at Infortrend, "Our ESVA solution was able to meet all of the Oakley Elementary School District's storage challenges. The district is now able to simplify and streamline its data backup operations -- while reducing costs at the same time."

The iSCSI-host ESVA allows users to leverage current investments in IP networks to consolidate a powerful, reliable and flexible 1GbE iSCSI SAN. With high-performance drives, it can satisfactorily handle demanding workloads. By consolidating up to 12 ESVA systems into a storage pool, the maximum capacity can be further expanded to 768 drives. The as-needed scaling allows users to increase storage for top-tier applications in the most cost-effective manner.

The additional features and benefits include large-capacity storage system capable of storing all backup data, storage virtualization, thin provisioning, distributed load balancing, advanced data protection features to ensure high availability, a single, user-friendly interface to manage storage system operations and configurations, and high cost-effective pricing.

"Installation went smoothly and the included software made it both quick and easy to install and configure," noted Dunn. With Infortrend's ESVA systems, we now have multiple backups for all of our critical servers, and we do not need to purchase costly backup hardware and software for new, small systems which effectively doubles the cost of these systems. Plus, the Infortrend systems we have are expandable and can be used for other functions in the future."