The Ohio State University Shrinks Storage Expenditures and Improves Services
Overview
The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business ranks among the top 25 business schools in the nation at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Fisher College of Business selected Compellent to meet its need for a redundant, scalable and secure enterprise storage solution to support its 300 plus faculty and staff members and more than 4,500 students.
Situation
The college provides every student, faculty and staff member their own dedicated electronic work space to store research, coursework, email and personal documents. It centralized all of its data into a Storage Area Network (SAN) five years ago. After analysis of its current solution, the Fisher College of Business found further expansion would not be cost-effective.
The college needed a storage platform that could meet its growth projections, provide greater protection in the event of a failure and possibly provide additional features that could be leveraged into a more efficient Storage Area Network (SAN) implementation. With budgets tight and staff resources already stretched, the college needed an affordable solution that could be managed without necessarily adding additional management resources.
Solution
After attending a demonstration of the system, Rob Kinney, systems developer/engineer for the college, immediately recognized that Compellent would transform how the college currently managed storage. Not only did the Compellent architecture provide greater scalability and redundancy, the Storage Center applications would allow the college to cut its storage expenditures 50 percent and free up hours of administration time.
Reducing Storage Expenditures by 50 Percent
Trying to make the best use of available storage, the IT staff spent long hours sizing volumes and managing disk space.
Compellent's Dynamic Capacity allows staff to quickly create any size volume and add storage online as needed. By only purchasing storage it is actually using and utilizing lower cost storage for infrequently accessed data, the college expects to reduce overall storage expenditures by 50 percent in the next 12 months.
Increasing IT Service Levels Without Adding Staff
With storage capacity growing 75 percent per year and users demanding 7x24 system access, administrators found it hard to fit in backups and deploy new enhancements.
Now storage capacity is allocated in minutes, accelerating the deployment of new applications. Lost or damaged data is recovered in seconds, allowing faculty and students to quickly resume their work. Midday changes are captured and quickly restored in the event of a hazard, eliminating lost research that occurred with previous backup and recovery methods.
Managing disk space, completing backups and recovering data now take 1/3 of the time they did before installing the Compellent solution.
Utilizing Lower Cost Storage
The college stores years of research online. Although most files are accessed infrequently, the college found it tedious to identify which files were accessed least often.
Compellent's Data Progression automatically tracks data access and migrates seldom accessed data to lower cost storage devices based on rules the college defines. The college estimates Data Progression will enable it to migrate 40 percent of its data to lower cost storage, with no additional administration.