Colby-Sawyer College Achieves Continuous Availability With DataCore

DataCore Software Corporation announced that Colby-Sawyer College, a private baccalaureate college founded in 1837 and situated on a 200-acre campus in New London, NH, achieved its BC goals, and realized performance and productivity gains and cost savings by using its SANsymphony-V.

Reducing risk through better data protection was the key reason behind Colby-Sawyer College’s adoption of the SDS platform.

According to assistant director of IT David Blaisdell: “In order to regain the level of redundancy we had before moving to the hybrid flash/disk array and add needed redundancy for HA to our VDI deployment, we had to find a solution. DataCore met all our requirements and added many other features. Now, even with one server room offline, our storage is always available.“

The college has experienced a reduction in storage-related downtime since deploying DataCore in a synchronously mirrored, ‘metro-clustered’ configuration. By having real-time redundancy of data between its two data centers, the IT team minimizes downtime as well as risk when considering damage to a data center or failure of a single storage array. If a storage array goes down, systems will stay online.

DataCore has decreased the time spent on routine storage tasks for IT staff at the college. IT can maintain the institution’s storage arrays during business hours without impact to systems running in-production.

Turbo-Charged Performance and Increased Capacity and Productivity
Colby-Sawyer College has also achieved increased performance as a result of DataCore’s inherent caching benefits and – due to the performance multiplier brought on by caching – its physical arrays do not see nearly the activity as they used to.

The college is using DataCore’s auto-tiering feature in combination with NexGen Storage, Inc.‘s QoS policies, which enables it to realize better performance. In the future, the college anticipates that with auto-tiering, it will be able to reduce its need for premium-priced equipment.

DataCore has improved productivity at Colby-Sawyer College by enabling the IT staff to manage their storage assets from a single interface. Thin-provisioning of capacity delivers better capacity optimization and centralized automation ensures better allocation of storage resources. In addition, IT managers at the school are impressed with DataCore’s monitoring capabilities, which enable them to view just about any metric imaginable.

Reduced Storage Costs and Expanded Purchasing Options
Colby-Sawyer College anticipates being able to delay and even avoid outright certain storage costs with the SDS software. It no longer has to get rid of software as part of refresh cycles, but can extend the life of storage investments as well as skip expensive refresh cycles completely. Moreover, it is able to avoid costly hardware lock-in and entertain more attractive alternatives from competing storage hardware suppliers.

“DataCore gives us the luxury of adding any other storage we may adopt in our environment without having to worry about the SAN’s features,” said Blaisdell. “We can also foresee DataCore extending the lifespan of our storage arrays. “DataCore provides all of the high-end SAN features we could desire. Bottom-line: Centralized, automated storage management through a unified, DataCore SANsymphony-V storage services platform delivers enormous value to those tasked with making sure all IT systems run non-stop at Colby-Sawyer College.“

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