by Compellent Technologies, — May 06, 2009
Most organizations share the same data recovery needs as large enterprises. The trick is to meet large-scale needs on a small-scale budget. Kyle Berger of Alvarado Independent School District took a different approach to remote replication, a multi-site, multi-customer strategy that nearly pays for itself, and shares his strategies with attendees at C-Drive.
3:17: Kyle Berger of Alvarado School District kicks things off with a summary of his title, responsibilities and the IT needs of his school district.
3:18: First audience response question: What is the number of end-users in your organization? 58 percent answered 1–1,000, while another 37 percent answered 1,001–3,000 end-users.
3:20: Alvarado School District grows by about 100 kids a year, which is slow and steady.
3:21: Kyle’s IT challenges:
- Funding is never guaranteed and is always changing
- Reliability and accessibility are required for data protection, recovery and data integrity
3:22: “What we were looking for was reliability in a SAN environment…Disaster recovery is never top of mind, but I always know I have to deal with it,” said Kyle. “Overhead and ROI are critical. I need to really stretch that dollar and justify it back to the public, whose taxes pay for this technology.”
3:23: “Our solution is a DR consortium between K-12 school districts,” said Kyle. “We came up with a way to connect districts through the Compellent SAN. We have multi-site replication without added overhead or cost.”
3:27: Kyle points out that with the Compellent product, it’s very easy to implement this DR solution.
3:29: Kyle lists out the parameters of the Disaster Recovery Consortium (DRC) and testing include:
- DRC is user-driven with a user group board of directors
- Quarterly health checks of the Compellent device
- Two annual enrollment periods into the DRC
- Data Integrity tested twice a year between sites
- Replication is encrypted between sites for security
3:32: The benefits of the overall solution is a leveraged current investment in the SAN, added remote survivability at zero cost, lower data center footprint, no added energy cost, no need to learn a new system, support and compliance, according to Kyle.
3:33: In terms of ROI, it’s easy to establish, the flexibility to leverage the investment for a ROI that goes beyond the initial investment with no added costs.
3:35: Kyle lists out his lessons learned, which are:
- The time and coordination of initial connection
- Limited site connectivity
- Initial sync, available bandwidth and data push
- User adoption – beyond technology departments
- Different SAN versions?
- Remote site downtimes?
- Bandwidth throttling and expectations
- Replication software not frequent purchase first SAN
3:36: “Portable volume can do in one day what used to take 12 weeks,” Kyle proclaims. “I’m looking forward to how it will help us in the DRC.”
3:39: Kyle looks at the future of the DRC, which will include five school districts across Texas by tht ened of 2009, additional states in January 2010 and eventually move cross county for multi-site DR for K-12 mission-critical applications.
3:40: “The end-users are really driving this program forward,” said Kyle.
3:41: Another audience response question: What would you like to hear more about? 58 percent of the audience wants more technical information. Kyle introduces Pablo Coronado of EST Group to get granular on the technology.
3:43: Pablo stresses that these are not hot-sites. He also used Enterprise Manager to connect from one system to another.
3:49: Pablo continues to offer up some technical information on the DRC.
3:55: Pablo states, “Most of the school districts in Texas have adopted virtualization.”