San Joaquin Valley College Shifts to Virtual Storage

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 11/03/11

San Joaquin Valley College, a career college in California with 10 campuses, has moved storage functions to a virtual storage system from EMC. When it outgrew its direct attached storage system, the private institution chose EMC's VNXe unified storage system. VNXe, intended for smaller organizations, has two versions. The VNXe3100 supports up to 96 drives; the VNXe3300 can accommodate up to 120 drives.

The new EMC gear came with a single sheet of instructions for deploying the application, said Network Architect Nick Heryford, and installation took "less than one hour." Once the system was installed, he noted, the IT team migrated 80 production virtual machines to the new storage environment.

"The VNXe wizards, with embedded application best practices, ensured everything was configured correctly the first time," said Heryford. "We now leverage the wizards for ongoing system management which takes us half the time compared with our previous storage."

With the new storage setup, which integrates with the college's VMware virtual environment, IT can see the entire environment from one console. "It removes the step of having to go into the physical environment to provision storage. With VNXe everything is simple," he added.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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