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Storing Lots of Classroom Content at Fitchburg State
10/9/2006
That was one consideration in selecting Lefthand Networks: the school wanted a storage area network that could be geographically distributed for greater fault tolerance. “We did want to have load-balanced servers,” Maner says, “and data split between the two data centers.”
The new SAN has 10 terabytes of storage right now and, compared to the school’s earlier system of direct-attached storage, is “far easier to manage [and] to back up.”
As Fitchburg’s storage needs grow, so will the system. Unlike other systems the school considered, this one allows the addition of new storage space while the network is running. That feature is important, Maner says. “We wanted the modularity to grow in an easy, quick way as faculty need more space to store content.” Fitchburg currently has 14 mission-critical servers on the storage area network, running everything from Blackboard to the e-mail system and the student information system. “You really don’t want to take any of those down to add capability,” Maner says. “Most of the other vendors we looked at [required] some form of downtime to add capacity after a certain point.”
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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