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| School has deployed the 12-bay , AssuredSAN 3730 with the capacity of 14 TB and five free drive slots |
Dot Hill Systems Corp., a provider of world-class storage solutions and software, has been selected by Worle Community School in Somerset, UK, to upgrade its storage in line with the comprehensive school’s recent move to a VMware-based virtualised IT environment. The customer has deployed the 12-bay Dot Hill AssuredSAN™ 3730 with an installed capacity of 14 TB and five free drive slots for future expansion.
To support 200 staff and 1487 pupils, Worle Community School relies on over 700 client machines across the campus ranging from laptops to client workstations and other desktop servers. Having chosen a mixture of Apple Mac OX S and Windows platforms, the school is also an accredited Apple regional training centre offering regular courses to its staff, students, other schools and members of the local community wishing to become competent users of Apple hardware and software.
In keeping with its cutting-edge ethos, the school recently moved to a virtual server platform which, in turn, required a storage solution that would seamlessly and efficiently work in a virtualised environment. As the school is legally required to retain user data for at least five years, storage is an important element of the overall IT infrastructure and the storage infrastructure would be host to a range of applications including SQL servers, file servers, DTP and authentication services.
Allison Clark, Network Manager at the school, explained the deciding factors for the new system, “We knew that we needed a rack-mounted storage platform to save on space. But even more critical was our need for full VMware certification and compatibility with associated software such as Veeam. As with all state-funded establishments we also needed to demonstrate value for money or, in this case, a great price to performance ratio. Dot Hill was the only vendor to offer an option that met all our requirements and the solution overall was a great fit for our virtualised infrastructure.”
"While we have what we need for the foreseeable future, the Dot Hill range will allow us to easily expand our storage as our capacity requirements grow." |
The Worle Community School IT team turned to Dot Hill’s reseller Novatech, which recommended the AssuredSAN™ 3000 series, a rack-mounted range of storage arrays full certification for both VMware- and Veeam-based environments. Clark selected the 10GB iSCSI model for easy integration into their existing Ethernet infrastructure, future scalability and ease of use; the system’s simple installation and administration process were also very appealing, “We’re very happy with our decision. While we have what we need for the foreseeable future, the Dot Hill range will allow us to easily expand our storage as our capacity requirements grow. The installation was also very straightforward thanks to a web-based interface; we chose to run with RAID 6 for added data recovery and the setup wizard took us through the configuration in just minutes.”
The Dot Hill AssuredSAN range includes both 12-bay 3.5” drive enclosures or 24-bay 2.5” drive enclosures to allow customers to optimise for either high performance or storage capacity. Each RAID configuration can be easily expanded to a maximum of 192 drives or 288TB using currently available 3TB drives.
