Dell Server and Storage for Texas Victoria College

Victoria College, a community
college and continuing education hub serving the Crossroads region of South
Texas, is one of the examples of companies turning to Dell, Inc. to
modernize its virtual storage environment and computer resources.

To address capacity constraints with its former EMC SAN, Victoria College
migrated to a more flexible and cost-effective Dell Compellent storage solution
that reduces data center costs with a three-fold improvement in storage
utilization.

The college has relied on Dell for 15 years for much of its technology
infrastructure to provide students and teachers a dependable learning
environment. The IT team deployed a Dell Compellent Storage Center with 30TB of raw capacity, up to three
times the capacity of its EMC array, for about the cost of the maintenance renewal
on its legacy SAN.

To modernize and improve data center efficiency, Victoria College virtualized
most of its infrastructure using Dell PowerEdge M610 and M600 blade servers
running virtualization software. The Compellent SAN provides the necessary
storage capacity to support the virtualized environment and
provides new services to students and teachers.

Victoria College’s three-fold improvement in storage utilization is a product
of Compellent thin provisioning. This enables the institution to make the
most of its storage resources without wasting them on pre-allocated and unused
storage, compared to its legacy EMC storage array. Thin provisioning allows the
college to create storage volumes instantaneously, versus up to two to three minutes
with its former solution, also freeing up IT maintenance time.

In addition to simplified management, Compellent offers Victoria College
no unplanned downtime, giving the college the power to add capacity, change
system configuration and initiate new functionality without interrupting
operations and data access.

"With the flexible, modular design
of the Dell Compellent SAN, we are able to quickly scale, mix and match the
latest drive technologies, and cost-effectively address changing budgetary
constraints, which was not possible with our legacy EMC solution,"
said Daniel Robinson, Victoria College systems administrator. "Dell’s intuitive and easy-to-use technology
gives us the flexibility to evolve over time and focus our attention on
delivering quality services to our students, teachers and administrators."

"Educational institutions like
Victoria College are tasked with offering reliable, cost-effective and useful
resources that enrich both learning and teaching environments," said
Travis Vigil, Dell storage executive director. "When combined with Dell PowerEdge blade servers, Dell Compellent offers
Victoria College optimal use of its storage resources for a fraction of the
cost of the previous solution. The new Dell technology also has vastly
decreased the time it takes for Victoria College to get new services up and
running, allowing the IT team to focus on delivering valuable educational
services rather than managing IT resources."