Whitehall City School District Reduces Disk Expenditures and Simplifies Administration with Automated Tiered Storage
Overview
Whitehall City School District relies on technology to provide a well-rounded academic program that prepares students for the world of work or higher education. With approximately 3000 K-12 students, 400 faculty members and a broad range of user applications, the district’s storage requirements continue to grow annually. Unfortunately, Whitehall’s annual IT budget gets tighter each year so they are always looking for ways to accomplish more with less money.
With storage needs growing and available dollars shrinking, Whitehall’s technology staff selected Compellent for its ability to mix and match lower cost, high capacity disks and high performance disk drives within a single array, to lower costs and ease storage administration.
Situation
Whitehall’s existing Fibre Channel SAN had reached full capacity with its existing enclosures and would require a major investment to add more disk space. In order to recover allocated but unaccessed disk space and delay purchasing additional storage, the IT team spent the majority of their time during summer break deleting and re-creating each student’s user directory.
When Whitehall transitioned from Novell to Microsoft disk space requirements doubled. Five months into the school year they had reached full storage capacity but lacked funds to purchase additional Fibre Channel storage. Weekly backups that required 300 GB of Fibre Channel disk space ceased due to lack of space, forcing IT to use tape backup – a manual process taking 50+ hours.
Whitehall needed a storage platform that would enable them to implement a multitiered storage approach and leverage lower cost technology without the burden of manually classifying data or moving files.
Solution
Since implementing Storage Center, 85 percent of Whitehall’s data has automatically migrated from high performance Fibre Channel disk drives to high-capacity SATA drives. Because the district is now storing so much data on SATA drives they have been able to purchase more disk space at a lower cost, increase storage capacity and still remain within budget. With less expensive storage, Whitehall is now able to retain data for each student throughout their academic career providing educational continuity in keeping with the State of Ohio’s Educational Standards.
Storage Center’s Data Progression enabled Whitehall’s technology staff to understand where the majority of the data is stored and determine baseline requirements for the next budget cycle. And, Storage Center has reduced storage administration time as well, allowing Whitehall’s Technology Staff to spend the summer break on more proactive work instead of sorting, migrating and deleting files in an effort to manage disk capacity.
Space-Efficient Backups for Fast, Reliable Recovery
When Whitehall ran out of Fibre Channel disk space with their previous SAN they began backing up to tape – a manual process – that took 50 hours or more per week. Now, with Data Instant Replay, the Whitehall Technology Staff is able to have 25 volumes running replays every 15 minutes. Each volume is assigned its own replay schedule based on the significance of the data stored. Performing backups is simple, automated and consumes only 1 GB of SATA disk space, providing significant savings in cost and man-hours.
Reducing Disk Expenditures by 74 Percent
With its previous SAN, Whitehall stored all their data on Fibre Channel disks, spending thousands of dollars annually on additional disk space. Facing a major disk drive upgrade that would have run over $50,000, Whitehall decided a new approach was needed. With Compellent’s Storage Center, Whitehall has been able to migrate 85 percent of its data from Fibre Channel to SATA leaving 2.4 TB of available Fibre Channel disk space. As a result, Whitehall only needs to purchase a minimal amount of less costly SATA disk, delivering a 74 percent cost reduction versus last year.
Increasing IT Service without Adding Staff
Prior to Storage Center, file recovery required considerable IT time and effort. As a result, the Whitehall Technology Staff had implemented a policy that they would not recover student files under any circumstance. Students stored projects on removable media and were responsible for keeping the media safeguarded. Occasionally, a student would lose a file – estimated 20-30 instances per year – and if what was lost was related to a major project it could negatively impact the student’s grade. With Storage Center recovery has become so simple that the Technology Staff changed its policy and will now retrieve student files at a teacher’s request, enabling them to go a further in supporting Whitehall students.