CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Key Benefits • Provides reliable file storage capacity to 60,000 students and faculty • Meets performance and availability requirements for roaming profile system, allowing students to access personal profiles from anywhere on three disparate campuses • Enables IT staff to scale and provision storage resources within minutes • Allows disk-to-disk-to-tape backup to be completed regularly with no disruption to production environment and provides fast restore • Includes built-in replication technology for remote disaster recovery site
Intransa Helps Students Access Files and User Profiles Across San Jacinto College Campus Network Business Challenge San Jacinto College, serving Harris County, Texas, near Houston, provides its students with a roaming profile that allows them to log on to any workstation on the network and access personal file storage, shortcuts, favorites, and any other user profile setting. The service allows students to work on class work from nearly any lab, lecture hall, or lounge in the school’s three metropolitan campuses. However, the college’s Fibre Channel SAN did not have the available space to support the more than 60,000 active profiles. Solution After evaluating a number of IP SAN solutions, the college settled on a powerful, highly scalable, and easy-to-use IP storage solution from Intransa. Since deploying the system, students have reported no problems logging in and have been able to access their profiles from anywhere on campus. In addition, the IT staff is able to add capacity, provision storage, and manage the system without any trouble.
The Problem San Jacinto College is a public institution serving Harris County, Texas, in metropolitan Houston. It provides higher education services and practical job training classes to more than 20,000 students on three disparate campuses. As part of their education, the college provides students with a roaming profile to allow them to have the same application settings, shortcuts, and favorites on any workstation they log into on the network. Students can also work off any application – like AutoCAD and other engineering software, reading and math software, or video production applications – and continue projects already in progress, even if they worked on the project on another workstation in a different building or on a remote campus. When San Jacinto College first implemented roaming profiles, they had performance issues due to poor performance from the NAS solution that was implemented. Because the college is a commuter school and its student population is more dynamic than a traditional four-year university, the IT staff must manage more than 60,000 user profiles due to students who may take whole semesters off, or spread their course load over a longer period. With the college’s existing StorageTek Fibre-Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) completely full and not able to add additional storage, they were faced with finding another solution. In addition, the fiber channel SAN was complex and inflexible, and management of the system took much of the IT staff’s time and resources. “We knew that in order to use the system to its capacity, we would need to re-engineer our storage network,” said Will Sydnor, systems administrator, San Jacinto College. “The higher cost and complexity of our Fibre-Channel SAN simply was not worth the money and IT resources we were dedicating to it.”
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY The Solution
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San Jacinto College investigated several IP-SAN solutions, including systems from NetApp and EMC, but eventually settled on the Intransa IP SAN system. The ease of use and cost impressed Sydnor, who was also surprised that the performance and availability of Intransa was equal to or more powerful than the other solutions including his old Fibre-Channel SAN. Sydnor originally purchased two Intransa controllers and one disk enclosure, but quickly scaled up with two additional disk enclosures, bringing his total capacity to 12 TB. Since Intransa storage can grow to as much as 1,500TB, San Jacinto has a long way that they can continue to grow. “We had heard that iSCSI solutions had advanced enough since we had deployed our Fibre-Channel SAN that we wanted to investigate that option,” Sydnor said. “First we wanted to see if IP could perform per our requirements, and second, we needed it to be easy to manage and cost effective. On all these levels, no one was able to come close to Intransa.” Once purchased and plugged in, Sydnor’s first step was to setup the volumes where the roaming profiles would reside. Using Intransa’s intuitive StorControl and StorCluster software, he was able to create the volumes and attach them to the servers within minutes. After that, it was a simple task to point the student’s profile path in active directory to the new storage. The whole process took less than 15 minutes. With extra capacity to play with, Sydnor then decided to use Intransa for his backup and recovery system. He set up a disk-to-disk-to-tape solution that shortened the backup cycle and allowed for much faster restores.
Business and IT Benefits Since the Intransa implementation, Sydnor and the IT staff have heard no complaints from students about login or availability issues on the roaming profile system. Students are able to access files and work on applications from anywhere on campus giving them a powerful tool to complete class work no matter what building they are located in. The issues that plagued the system at San Jacinto College before deploying Intransa and the issues currently plaguing other schools considering their own roaming profile system are non existent. San Jacinto College was able to achieve this level of availability and performance while keeping costs in check. The Intransa solution allowed them to provide end users with
“First we wanted to see if IP storage could perform per our requirements, and second, we needed it to be easy to manage and cost effective. On all these levels, no one was able to come close to Intransa.” – Will Sydnor, System Administrator, San Jacinto College reliable storage options at a fraction of the cost of other IP solutions and comparable Fibre-Channel solutions. By leveraging existing infrastructure inherent in IP networks, the college was able to save even more on additional networking equipment and management software. Sydnor estimates that Intransa has enabled the college to already save six times the cost of the solution. In the future, Sydnor plans to continue to roll applications and storage from his Fibre-Channel SAN to the Intransa solution. Sun Microsystems (StorageTek) had already announced that it will cease to support the SAN that San Jacinto College currently deployed, but instead of upgrading to newer models, Sydnor plans to scrap the entire Fibre-Channel network and move everything over to the more cost-effective IP. “It just makes sense financially,” Sydnor explains. “I was able to add three times more capacity to the Intransa system for less money than it would have cost me to just replace the Fibre-Channel SAN.” Before the next hurricane season, Sydnor plans to deploy a remote disaster recovery site in Austin, Texas, with an additional Intransa IP SAN system that has built-in replication functionality. Data is automatically replicated over the IP network between the two controllers creating a real-time copy of all data on the network. If a system goes down, or the entire data center is wiped out, the college will be able to failover to the remote site without any disruption to the systems. Sydnor also plans to eventually move Exchange to the Intransa system. Currently, San Jacinto College only provides email to administrators, faculty and staff, but because of the inexpensive storage capacity provided by Intransa, the school is investigating expanding the IT service to students. If that happens, Sydnor will need to double capacity, a process he can do in a few days by ordering more storage enclosures from Intransa and simply plugging them into the controllers. Adding the same capacity to the school’s FibreChannel SAN would take months to complete and cost nearly as much as the entire solution.
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