Infortrend ESVA at Oakley Union Elementary School District

The Oakley Union
Elementary School District in California provides quality education to students within the district boundaries.

With
seven different school sites located throughout the city of Oakley, the
district handles large amounts of data, which needs to be securely protected in
order to preserve student records and other vital information. Achieving data backup for all of this vital school data is a challenge that the
district had been meeting through the use of a complicated configuration that
created backups of server data – making the central management of backups
difficult and costing the district a considerable amount in terms of time
allocated and money spent.

Looking to revamp the manner in which data was being backed
up, the district commenced a search for a storage solution that was
centralized, simple to manage, capable of creating duplicates of data backups,
and priced to meet budget criteria. After a thorough vetting of available
offerings, the district, led by Director of Technology Jay Dunn, selected the
ESVA iSCSI-host storage solution from Infortrend Technology, Inc.

Infortrend’s ESVA solution is connected to the school
servers through a dedicated 1GbE iSCSI switch. Data from all servers can now be
directly backed up on the ESVA solution through this SAN (Storage Area Network)
configuration. According to Thomas Kao, director of product planning at
Infortrend, "Our ESVA solution was able to meet all of the Oakley
Elementary School District’s storage challenges. The district is now able to
simplify and streamline its data backup operations – while reducing costs at
the same time."

The iSCSI-host ESVA allows users to leverage current
investments in IP networks to consolidate a flexible
1GbE iSCSI SAN. With performance drives, it can handle
demanding workloads. By consolidating up to 12 ESVA systems into a storage
pool, the maximum capacity can be further expanded to 768 drives. The as-needed
scaling allows users to increase storage for top-tier applications.

"Installation went smoothly and the included software
made it both quick and easy to install and configure," noted Dunn. "With
Infortrend’s ESVA systems, we now have multiple backups for all of our critical
servers, and we do not need to purchase costly backup hardware and software for
new, small systems which effectively doubles the cost of these systems. Plus,
the Infortrend systems we have are expandable and can be used for other
functions in the future."

Additional features and benefits include:

• Large-capacity
  storage system capable of storing all backup data
• Storage
  virtualization
• Thin
  provisioning
• Distributed load
  balancing
• Advanced data
  protection features to ensure high availability
• A single interface to manage storage system operations and configurations
• Cost-effective pricing