Xiotech Reduces Southwestern Illinois College Backup Cycles

Xiotech Corporation announced Southwestern Illinois College (SWIC) has improved storage performance and availability with Xiotech, including decreasing restore times from four to eight hours down to 15 minutes.

For an active community college of 26,000 students across three campuses and more than 20 off-campus sites, the difference has had a positive impact in managing costs and ensuring resources are available to faculty and students.

SWIC undertook a storage overhaul as part of an IT centralization and virtual data center effort that resulted in the creation of a 100 server farm. To manage rapidly growing data demands – which also now include new data collection requirements as a result of a Title III grant award from the Department of Education – SWIC needed to build a Storage Area Network (SAN) connecting completely virtualized storage resources to ensure the highest levels of performance and availability while also reducing complexity and containing costs. SWIC chose VMware and Xiotech’s ISE solutions as the backbone for the virtual data center to provide the flexibility to manage and change storage resources at anytime through a single ISE management platform.

"One of the most compelling reasons we chose Xiotech was the ability to leverage their solutions to split our SAN across two data centers for immediate failover should we have a problem," said Christine Leja, CIO at Southwestern Illinois College.

At the center of the SWIC SAN are Xiotech’s ISE storage blades and the Emprise 7000 storage controller, with a virtualized, distributed architecture. SWIC was able to split the SAN across two data centers with 15-minute backup cycles for failover capabilities.

"Combining virtualization initiatives with high-performance storage allows organizations to save money, improve service levels and enable better long-range planning," said Brian Reagan, CMO at Xiotech. "Our customers have already realized tangible savings thanks to the increased performance, linear scalability, and reduced maintenance, support and energy use of ISE. They are fully prepared to continue growth and avail themselves of new educational opportunities."