Saint Michael's College Implements Storage and Backup Service
In an effort to manage rapid data growth, Saint Michael's College near Burlington, VT has replaced its existing
storage infrastructure with a service that combines local storage controllers
with cloud storage.
The significant increase in the volume of data was straining the college's
network resources, and the cost of scaling its existing storage infrastructure
to meet demand proved too expensive. The ever-expanding volume of data was also
overwhelming the college's backup system, so it could no longer complete a
backup with a 24-hour window.
"It was far too expensive to purchase the hardware we continually had to buy
to scale," said Joe Pawlaczyk, associate director of the IT data center at St.
Michael's, in a prepared statement. "Plus, as the amount of data we had grew,
between two storage area networks, tape and additional disk storage, we couldn't
back everything up in 24 hours. And even after we backed everything up,
recovering files for our users was complex, time consuming and difficult."
The college's IT team began searching for a cloud-based solution that could
provide high performance for end users, and that was easy to manage, intuitive,
cost effective and secure, while allowing the college to maintain control of its
data.
The team selected the Nasuni Service,
which uses the Nasuni Filer appliance to cache the most frequently used data on
site and automatically backs up the environment to the cloud as often as every
60 seconds. The college pays only for the storage it uses, and when it needs
more space, the IT team can contact the company to increase the capacity within
minutes, according to information from Nasuni. To ensure the security of the
college's data, all encryption keys are held only by Saint Michael's.
Since implementing the new system, the college's users have noticed no
difference in performance, but scalability is no longer an issue, backups
complete on time and the IT team can recover any data from word processing
documents to multi-terabyte data volumes quickly and easily, according to
information from the company.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].