Facing dynamically growing volumes of data, the Corona-Norco Unified School District needed to consolidate its virtual storage and data protection environment for better management, infrastructure efficiency and cost control.
The Corona-Norco Unified School District (CNUSD) is located approximately 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles in western Riverside County. The large district has 31 elementary schools, eight intermediate/middle schools, five comprehensive high schools, a middle college high school and three alternative schools. With an enrolment of over 53,000 students, it is the largest school district in Riverside County and the tenth largest district in California.
Business situation
With mounting volumes of data and more than 20,000 desktops to protect, the CNUSD was increasingly concerned with its existing Fiber Channel-based storage infrastructure and associated high cost per terabyte.
The school district needed a more cost-effective way to provide virtual storage for production data in its VMware environment as well as secondary storage for backup and Disaster Recovery. Compounding the challenge was the district’s need to optimize depleting rack space while lowering overall power consumption to further reduce costs.
With vital school production data to securely store, such as Exchange email and district databases, the IT staff for the CNUSD began to seek an iSCSI-based solution that would conserve power and rack space while offering the enterprise-class performance and reliability needed.
“With data center space at a premium, storage system density is important to us,” said Brian Troudy, Network Manager, CNUSD. “The Nexsan E60 offers 60 drives in a mere 4U of rack space, which provides much greater density compared to alternatives. Furthermore, we can populate the system with a mix of SAS drives to align storage performance with application requirements.”
Nexsan E-Series model E60TM storage system with AutoMAID
The CNUSD solved all its challenges with the Nexsan’s E-Series model E60 storage system. The system was selected for its performance, density and value. CNUSD also benefited from the system’s unique power management features, providing up to 87% energy savings.
The school district quickly and effectively consolidated production data in its VMware environment and further enhanced its data protection strategy with the Nexsan E60, which includes 40 SAS drives to provide primary storage for exchange, database and other production data.
An additional 20 SAS drives are used for disk-based backup for complete protection of the school district’s information. All of this storage capacity fits in a compact 4U of rack space for superior space efficiency.
Delivering further value for the growing school district, the E60 features Nexsan’s power efficient AutoMAID technology for low power consumption and data center maintenance costs.
After successfully implementing the E60, the school district was so impressed with Nexsan that it acquired three more units when it needed more storage. Extra capacity was required for the deployment of 800 surveillance cameras across the district, to provide students with federal levels of safety.
The storage requirements are significant with high definition 5MP cameras shooting in 2k resolution and video needing to be retained for 30 days. The Nexsan E60 units were perfectly suited to meet the requirements in terms of retention, bandwidth and infrastructure.
The implementation process was painless, the infrastructure has proven equal to the task and there have been no issues to date.
Results
The Nexsan E60 platform has given the CNUSD the flexible, high density and high-performance platform it needed for its primary and secondary storage requirements in a single storage enclosure.
The success of the original implementation provided the foundation for the school district to adapt more E60 units when it decided to deploy 800 surveillance cameras to improve student safety. The implementation of additional E60 units have also allowed CNUSD to backup and protect an additional 50 terabytes of data each night.
“We needed a storage solution optimized for compatibility and performance in virtual environments that could also handle our need for more than a petabyte of storage. Nexsan fitted the bill perfectly,” said Brian Troudy, Network Manager, CNUSD.
“Nexsan was also the best solution when we decided to deploy video surveillance to all schools in the district. It provided cost-effective storage, especially important for a budget-conscious school district, at a quantity and capacity that no one else in the market can really match.”
