Edison State College Purchases Xiotech Emprise 7000

Xiotech Corporation announced that Edison State College in southwest Florida purchased an Emprise 7000 storage system, powered by Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, to be the foundation of its data center. Among other qualities, Edison State selected the Emprise 7000 system for its superior scalability, low total cost of ownership and remarkable ease of use.

With four campuses and a robust online ‘Virtual Campus,’ Edison State serves nearly 20,000 students and 400 employees. Edison State’s data was growing in an exponential fashion, and it needed an IT infrastructure that could scale as needed, provide reliable service at a low cost and be easy enough for staff in separate locations to manage and use. The college identified Emprise 7000 with its patented ISE technology as the best strategic storage investment.

"Emprise 7000 is much more versatile than other systems out there," said Dirk Goehring, IT manager for network and security at Edison State College. "From a cost-of-ownership perspective, we get much more usable space now than we did from our old storage, allowing us to use fewer disks and spend less on hardware. We’ll see a 10-12 percent drop in load on our uninterrupted power supply when we’re finished retiring our legacy system, meaning we’re saving on energy. Plus, Emprise 7000 generates far less heat than our old equipment, and our facilities department has noticed a big reduction in usage of our storage cooling system."

Edison State is working to virtualize its data center and adopt best practices on provisioning and managing storage along the way. Emprise 7000, with its ICON Manager user interface featuring Virtual View, dramatically simplifies storage monitoring, provisioning, and management in virtual environments by giving administrators a global, single-console view of all three storage layers (array, physical server, and virtual machine). With that, the college can safely and rapidly provision and manage storage for its virtual environments with just a few mouse clicks, instead of the dozens of steps from separate platforms required by most storage systems.

"With our record enrollment last year, and more significant growth expected, we were looking for a storage system we could scale and add features to as needed without resorting to forklift upgrades," Goehring added. "I’m much more comfortable running my critical data on Emprise 7000 than I was on other systems because of its design and technology. Plus, it’s so easy to use that there really isn’t much of a learning curve for my staff."

Emprise 7000 supports up to 64 ISE (1,024 terabytes) and is managed by dual controllers. Besides ICON Manager, it features a distributed cluster architecture, Intelligent Provisioning and a suite of data replication solutions.

ISE technology, the basis for Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 storage systems, significantly minimizes disk-related service events through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. It offers 100 percent usable storage capacity with no vendor holdbacks or drops in performance, and achieves the industry’s most efficient performance and scalability. In addition, it enables users to cut their ongoing storage costs in half through its five-year warranty and lower overall management costs.