CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Key Benefits • Improves reliability without sacrificing performance • Adds flexibility to network • Eases scalability and capacity pain • Reduces cost to add capacity • Enables university growth
Soka University of America Looks to Intransa to Deliver Flexible IP SAN Environment to Enable Sustained Growth. Business Challenge Soka University of America (SUA), a private liberal-arts college in Aliso Viejo, California, suffered scalability issues with a student body and new 103-acre campus that were continuously growing. An inflexible storage technology served as an inhibitor to administrators’ plans to implement new programs and accommodate an ever increasing data flow. Solution SUA replaced its direct-attached storage and antiquated fiber channel SAN systems with a centralized IP SAN from Intransa. The IP-based network allowed the university to continue its expansion plans while greatly lessening the impact on the school’s IT resources or budget.
The Problem Soka University of America, a private, four-year, liberal-arts college in Southern California, has undergone constant growth in both its student population and campus facilities in its young history. Since the first class of 120 undergraduates arrived on a new campus in 2001, the university has grown to nearly 400 students and is planning for new residence halls, classrooms and research labs. The school prides itself on using the latest technology and furnishes each entering freshman with a new laptop to use during their four years at the school. This constant growth and reliance on technology provides an open and innovative learning environment for students, but the strain on IT resources has been a constant challenge for Orr Orovan, senior systems administrator. When the university leadership elects to build a new facility such as a language lab, offer a new data-intensive course, or accommodate for storage and processing of large video and photo repositories, Orovan is consulted about whether SUA’s IT environment could support the additional resource drain. Because the university’s IT systems were supported by an inefficient direct-attached storage (DAS) system, Orovan couldn’t easily re-provision the requested resources to new systems. And when he needed to add capacity, he found that scaling the cumbersome DAS system was time-consuming and a strain on the budget. “I continuously found myself having to make concessions and battling with a compromised ability to accommodate administrators’ requests,” Orovan said. “It slowed us down, we simply weren’t efficient.” Typically, Orovan would be frustrated over a growing number of “storage islands”. Storage capacity was tied to a particular system but wasn’t being used effectively, because of architecture that made it difficult or impossible to provision resources between systems. File serving and email were of particular trouble. As storage capacity filled up, Orovan couldn’t easily scale up to meet demand. It was clear that he desperately needed to come up with a better storage network to adequately support the university’s dynamic IT needs.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY The Solution
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Soka University of America (SUA) initially relied on a centralized storage area network (SAN) that ran over Fibre Channel. While the SAN environment was a correct concept for SUA’s growing storage needs, it proved to be complicated, unreliable, hard to manage and expensive, so Orovan and his team decided to temporarily regress back to a DAS environment to ensure reliability. However, now that scalability and capacity became problems again, they started to look at other SAN solutions that could run over SUA’s existing IP network. They hoped that an IP storage solution could combine the reliability of their DAS with the performance and scalability of their SAN. “It was evident that we needed to go back to a SAN, but we had to make it more efficient and easier to manage and scale,” Orovan said.. Orovan worked with a storage reseller who recommended a solution from Intransa. Orovan researched the technology and realized the superiority of the solution’s architecture which is the only storage system on the market today that takes advantage of IP protocol communications fully throughout the network from servers through storage controllers to disk enclosures and individual disks. He also looked at other IP storage vendors but decided to go with Intransa’s superior system architecture which delivers improved performance and flexibility. Orovan installed an Intransa IP SAN utilizing increased flexibility to add additional disk enclosures. Six Intelbased servers running Windows – three file servers, one Exchange server, one email archiving server and one disk-to-disk backup server – power the network. Disparate systems on the network, from student email and file serving to audio and visual applications for the language lab, all capture data from a consolidated storage pool managed by the Intransa IP SAN. Management and configuration complexity inherent to the previous DAS system and Fibre Channel SAN would have made it impossible for Orovan to efficiently add the required storage capacity to the network.
Business and IT Benefits Before the installation, Soka University of America (SUA) had to compromise the performance of newly implemented projects and programs due to the IT department’s limited
“Our Intransa IP storage network allows the university to progress on time. When the administration wants to implement a new program we don’t have to wait for storage capacity to free up or a budget request to get passed. Our infrastructure is ready and we can accommodate requests without compromise.” – Orr Orovan, Senior Systems Administrator, Soka University of America ability to provide the necessary storage capacity. Now, the ability to provision storage resources to systems across the IP network allows Orovan to respond more quickly to faculty’s requests, and new program requests rarely get turned down for IT reasons. The IT department is now able to carve up the storage pool as necessary and re-provision resources as needs shift. In essence, the IT department is now a contributor rather than an inhibitor to growth. “With our new IP storage solution, there is no wasted space,” Orovan said. “I don’t have to worry about taking capacity away from one system to feed another.” Scalability is also a non-factor with the new solution. When shifting resources is not enough, Orovan is able to seamlessly add disk enclosures to Intransa’s controllers and make them immediately available to systems over the IP network. Before he deployed the Intransa controllers, Orovan often had to purchase an entire new array and take a $15,000 to $20,000 hit from the budget. Now, adding capacity costs a fraction of that. This ability to seamlessly add storage capacity on demand allows the university to better meet its changing file serving and application needs. New data intensive course can be added and new students can be set up with their IT needs. The flexibility of the Intransa storage solution allows SUA to make other aspects of its IT network more efficient. Orovan is in the process of migrating his backup system from a tape library to the faster, more efficient and reliable disk medium and is implementing the school’s email archiving solution. These are IT upgrades that would have been much more expensive and time-consuming over SUA’s old Fiber Channel SAN or DAS systems. “We dare to do things we couldn’t do before,” said Orovan.
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