Castro Valley Unified School District Chooses Reldata

RELDATA, Inc. announced that the Castro Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) has chosen RELDATA to support its expanding IT infrastructure, new technology initiatives, and storage environment that is expected to increase in future years. RELDATA’s unified storage system is providing the district a solution that offers more disaster recovery options than its previous tape backup system, and faster restoration of down systems.

Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Castro Valley Unified School District is a 14-school suburban district with two high schools and two middle schools, as well as elementary and adult school campuses. With an eye for incorporating cutting edge technology into its IT infrastructure, the district was an early adopter of wireless WAN technology, as well as distributed and synchronized student information systems.

The district is now in the process of implementing several new technology initiatives that include an enhanced student information system, new food services system, and email archiving. The student information system in particular is the life blood of any public school district, as it handles enrollment, compliance with state regulation, and is responsible for maintaining accurate average daily attendance figures, which is essential for securing state funding for daily operations.

"As we move toward a more centralized system to support our technology initiatives, expanding web sites and, as a result, an ever-increasing need for additional capacity, we knew we’d need a solution that would easily facilitate restoration if something went wrong – it had to be nearly bulletproof," said Bruce Gidlund, director of technology for CVUSD. "Based on our experience with the RELDATA solution so far, we have the assurance of greater uptime and peace of mind, knowing that our mix of virtual and non-virtual servers are working in tandem with the RELDATA 9240i storage area network to ensure the availability of critical data in the event of an emergency or software failure."

CVUSD has centralized most of its critical servers at the district office. Applications running on the servers include network monitoring, library inventory and management, a maintenance work order system, a secure student information system, state reporting services, web servers, content management systems, mail services and firewall services. Some of these services are virtualized, but the district still relies on several ‘one-server to one-service’ installations.

With the acquisition of a RELDATA 9240i, the district has begun to migrate all of its VMware servers to the SAN, and beginning the conversion of its other servers which will then be available to repurpose at school sites. By repurposing servers, the district will no longer need to continue purchasing new servers one-by-one, allowing the SAN to help pay for itself.

RELDATA’s user interface is enabling the district’s database administrator to manage LUN creation and snapshot scheduling. "The ability to create automated snapshots is one of the many features that made the RELDATA solution attractive to us, so we can have continuous fallback points without overrunning our storage space," said Gidlund. "This, combined with flexibility, ease of management, simple installation and the company’s reputation for exceptional service and reliability, made RELDATA the right choice for our IT needs."

"RELDATA addresses several requirements that the Castro Valley Unified School District had, including the ability to easily expand its storage capacity by adding modules to its existing system and having the ability to scale with the needs of the district as it continues to implement innovative technologies," said Rich Ozer, president of value added reseller Office Information Systems. "We’re pleased to offer a storage system with these capabilities, as it gives our customers a real-world solution that aligns with their strategy for building out their IT infrastructures and planning for future growth."

Built from the ground up, the RELDATA Unified Storage platform is based on an open, software-centric architecture that delivers performance for storage consolidation within complex multi-vendor and virtualized server environments. RELDATA’s Unified Storage Engine (USE) leverages the iSCSI fabric to manage block and file environments more cost-effectively than with Fibre Channel (FC) alternatives. It provides mid-size and remote enterprises with significant benefits compared to alternative FC networks including ease of implementation and simplified storage management that results in significant cost savings.