NYU School of Medicine Ensures Continuous Data Protection of its E-mail and Student Data
Overview
The NYU School of Medicine, one of the nation’s leading centers of advanced biomedical learning, has a history of excellence of more than 160 years in scientific research and in the education and training of physicians. Supporting more than 250 servers and 10,000 students, faculty and staff, NYU School of Medicine selected the Compellent Storage Center to meet its need for an affordable storage solution with enterprise recovery capabilities.
Situation
After three years of consistent growth NYU’s storage architecture was a network of direct-attached storage devices, providing more than 650 GB of storage to 250 servers. As Director of Systems, Jeff Berliner led the IT team and recognized it was time to move the school to an enterprise storage solution.
As SANs were being evaluated, a crisis drove home the system’s importance – an email server failed. Thanks to the RAID array no data was lost; however, no email could be delivered until the server’s large volume was restored. The outage left staff and students using less efficient methods of communication and struggling to share research information, submit applications and schedule meetings. Berliner and the team worked day and night to recover the data and restore email service.
Once email was back online, Berliner and other school administrators were able to justify the investment in a data storage solution that would maximize uptime and provide fast, simple and reliable data recovery.
Solution
Over the previous years, Berliner had met with multiple SAN vendors, but none provided a scaleable solution with continuous data protection capabilities that was affordable to a public university. Berliner selected Storage Center for its integrated recovery features that allowed him to take snapshots of data volumes every 15 minutes of the day (more than 150 per week) and recover to those snapshots in the event of a server failure. With Storage Center, NYU has eliminated the delays and downtime that previously exposed its community to the risks of email or data loss. Today, NYU School of Medicine has continuous data protection for email and other core services ensuring reliable 24/7 operation.
Recovery to Any Point-In-Time Delivers Continuous Protection
Berliner and his team were pleased that Storage Center integrated into their environment without any problems. With Replays (snapshots) set for each volume at 15-minute intervals, NYU has continuous data protection and can immediately recover to any point-in-time in the event of a server failure or even just a deleted file. With Compellent’s space-efficient architecture, NYU can create and store an unlimited number of Replays without utilizing excess storage capacity or negatively impacting performance.
Block-Level Storage Supports Heterogeneous Server and OS Environment
NYU’s server environment includes Windows, Unix, Linux and Apple’s OS X. NYU could not afford to deploy and maintain storage that depended on OS-specific software or features. Compellent’s Dynamic Block Architecture (DBA) enables sophisticated and fully-integrated storage capabilities by managing data at the block level for efficient space utilization, virtualization and quick recovery. With block-level storage and DBA, NYU can easily expand the capacity and management applications of its storage without OS limitations, without server agents and without impacting end-users.
Streamlines Storage Administration and Automates Recovery Process
Storage Center’s intuitive point-and-click interface enables the rapid creation of a nested snapshot schedule, vastly expanding the capabilities of a single administrator and automating the repetitive, time-consuming tasks related to recovery. With the Compellent SAN, NYU has streamlined its entire backup procedure and requires 50 percent less time to manage backup and recovery