Storage
U Northwestern – St. Paul Upgrades Storage
University of Northwestern — St. Paul has implemented a new storage system using flash arrays to support its
virtualized environment.
The university had been experiencing reliability issues with its existing
storage system as it neared the end of its service lifecycle, so the IT staff
began looking for a replacement system that could provide additional
functionality without exceeding the university's limited budget. Initially the
team considered replacing its existing system with a newer one from the same
vendor, but they ruled out that option because it proved too expensive and
didn't fulfill their wish list of features.
They were looking for a storage system that offered both iSCSI and fiber
channel, compression and deduplication data optimization, and replication to a
disaster recovery site, and that could do it all within the school's budget.
After checking out their options, the team selected Intelligent Flash Arrays
from Tegile Systems, a provider of
flash-driven storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual
desktop environments.
According to information from the company, the storage system met the
university's requirements and enabled them to add a storage area network (SAN)
at their disaster recovery site, while saving the university $35,000 per year on
support and nearly $200,000 on total cost of ownership over the university's
previous storage system. The new system also enabled the university to reduce
its floor space requirements by 75 percent, cut energy costs, improve virtual
machine boot times by as much as 20 percent, and use inline deduplication and
compression to reduce the amount of managed data by 40 percent.
University of Northwestern — St. Paul is a private, not-for-profit liberal
arts university serving more than 3,300 students in Roseville and Arden Hills,
MN.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].
