Educational Institutions Using DataCore

DataCore Software announced that the education sector continues to beat a path to DataCore as the cornerstone of a virtualized infrastructure.

"DataCore has been an excellent solution that enabled us to virtualize our new and existing storage solutions on the back-end while keeping a single interface and single management point for managing all of our different SAN environments," states Dustin Fennell, vice president of IT and CIO, Scottsdale Community College. "Beyond this, we have attained better performance with DataCore and we now have the benefit of high-availability."
 
DataCore’s software solutions enable the data centers and IT departments within educational institutions to better manage and maximize storage capacity and leverage existing hardware to protect and serve storage assets to Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtual servers and desktops.
 
Moreover, because DataCore cares about education and sees it as a strategic investment for the future, it therefore provides qualified academic institutions with access to special promotional offers and extra discounts of up to 50% on DataCore virtualization software packages.
 
Educational institutions of all sizes are embracing DataCore’s software-based approach to storage virtualization in order to enable them to overcome storage-related funding roadblocks, downtime and performance issues. A sampling of the very newest institutions in the US to embrace DataCore at the heart of their virtualization infrastructures are: American River College, Arizona State University, Bellarmine University, Berkshire School, Capital Community College, Louisburg College, Midwestern University, Mount Anthony Middle School, NY Network, Notre Dame Academy, Rogue Community College, North Star Charter School, Sacramento City College, Scottsdale Community College, Shenandoah School Corporation, Spalding University, University of California San Francisco, Three Rivers Community College, Utica College, Virginia Wesleyan College, Wittenberg University, and others.
 
In addition to these newer customers, in the USA a host of educational organizations have already deployed storage virtualization using DataCore’s SANmelody and SANsymphony solutions. These include Auburn University, Daytona Beach Community College, Georgia Institute of Technology, Los Rios Community College District, Midway College, Mount St. Mary’s University, Sullivan University, Syracuse University, Texas A&M University at Kingsville, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Illinois, University of Utah – Education Network, University of Utah, School of Medicine, and more – spanning the globe and all levels of education.
 
The needs of IT departments that support educational institutions can suffer from the same shortfall that every other IT department can: a virtualization project that stops at servers and desktops and therefore misses an important component – storage. "In a K-12 setting, if the school districts are not looking at virtualization, they are cutting their legs out from under themselves," states Steve Gumm, IT director, Barren County Schools.

 
Customer Testimonials in Education
Virtualizing storage resources means that institutions can: avoid downtime, planned or unplanned; improve the performance of storage devices; mix current storage devices with newly purchased equipment; and stay within a budget.
 
Oxford University
"The DataCore and VMware solution allows us to plug in and support storage and virtual servers as and when we need; ultimately DataCore provides a cost-effective storage solution that we are happy to recommend," said Jon Hutchings, Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS).

To read the case study
 
Scottsdale Community College
"Virtual computing has transformed our entire IT organization – the way we deliver services, the way we support them, and the way our end users consume them. Our previous SAN solution was a bottleneck in this environment and we needed a more high-performing solution. DataCore storage virtualization is a key component to the stability and performance of our virtual computing environment," said Dustin Fennell, Vice President of IT and CIO, Scottsdale Community College
 
Barren County Schools
"For all intents and purposes, we are 100% virtual. The biggest benefit for us was realizing a virtualized data infrastructure. Because we adopted storage virtualization, we now can deploy any storage hardware behind our environment that we want. Beyond this – with DataCore we were able to repurpose old equipment," said Steve Gumm, IT director, Barren County Schools.
 
To read the case study
 
Lakota Local Schools
"With a continually growing enterprise dependent on network based solutions, DataCore allowed us to implement a virtual infrastructure at a fraction of the cost and support of other storage solutions. As a result, we were able to virtualize several central systems, resulting in power, cooling and space savings as well as add additional redundancy," said Todd Wesley, Network Operations Administrator for Lakota Local Schools.
 
To read the case study
 
Rocklin Unified School District
"We had to put in place a virtual storage network that had the agility to keep up, while also providing the needed fault tolerant failover protection to safeguard our storage and maximize overall system uptime. Now, we have rolled out a new VMware and Citrix infrastructure in support of our applications. And DataCore is the underlying foundation for all of it," said Glenn Baker, Systems Engineer, Rocklin Unified School District.
 
To read the case study
 
Saginaw Intermediate School District
"We were also really won over by the fact that DataCore is an affordable solution for achieving high availability. And the transition from physical to virtual was seamless – nobody even knew it happened. Through DataCore thin-provisioning, we were able to migrate the servers we needed to, during the day, without causing any downtime to a school district," said Jeff Johnson, Director of Technical Services, Saginaw Intermediate School District.
 
To read the case study