Coraid EtherDrive SAN Deployed by Ohio Schools

CORAID, Inc.. announced that North Canton City Schools in Ohio have deployed CORAID EtherDrive SAN and a virtual storage environment to maximize data management efficiencies, simplify storage processes and migrations, while increasing the flexibility and scalability of the school district’s data storage environment. Leveraging the latest server virtualization technologies, EtherDrive SAN delivers affordably fast network storage that is simple to administer and scales easily to accommodate data growth.

"Like most businesses, our district network is volatile with administrators, students, teachers, and many temporary users online 24x7x365 with remote access. To address this we require a flexible, stable environment with 100% uptime that can grow on demand. EtherDrive helped us achieve this despite a very modest public budget," said John Fano, Network Systems Manager, North Canton Schools. "We looked at several competing offerings and technologies, but EtherDrive SAN was the only solution that provided high-end capabilities, affordably. We now have a reliable, easy-to-manage storage infrastructure that easily accommodates our 1 to 2 Gb of daily data growth. EtherDrive SAN’s virtual data management solution lets us grow our technology programs and focus on the students in the classroom rather than worry about the hardware in the closet."

North Canton schools deployed EtherDrive SAN to provide storage in a complex heterogeneous environment running Linux, Windows, and VMware ESX servers across seven schools and three administrative buildings. Serving 1700 computers and over 5000 users, North Canton is 98% virtualized on the server end and runs VMware ESXi host servers, relying on EtherDrive SAN for all storage needs.

"The public sector faces many of the same challenges as large enterprises, often with far less financial resources," said James Kemp, CEO of CORAID. "As the North Canton school district hit a wall with growing capacity demands, availability and performance needs, EtherDrive SAN simplified data storage, management, and deployment in a single virtualized solution. Now IT staff can focus on growth and academics, rather than justifying a budget to taxpayers."

CORAID EtherDrive SAN is a scalable network storage solution that fits SMB budgets. Delivering Fibre Channel speeds at Ethernet prices, EtherDrive SAN is affordably fast, simple to understand and easy to use. Built on the open ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) lightweight SAN protocol, EtherDrive provides enterprise-class storage that embraces virtualization for the demands of today’s IT organizations.

"Ohio has one of the most challenged school funding programs in the US, so we had to balance our expanding technology needs against a solution that would allow us to ‘plug and play’ with our existing infrastructure and easily scale as our infrastructure evolves," added Fano. "With cost savings of almost six times that of Fibre Channel and the simplicity of less than 30 minutes to set up the appliances, EtherDrive has exceeded our expectations."