Belchertown School Improves Latency With Avere

Avere Systems announced
that the Belchertown School District has implemented an Avere Systems FXT
Series cluster to improve overall latency and eliminate the write errors and
data corruption it experienced after deploying a new student information system
application to allow online access to class material, store work, record attendance
and grades. The new online system also experienced severe lag time as the
number of concurrent users soared.

The
Massachusetts-based school district’s existing infrastructure consisted of
multiple Cisco UCS systems running VMware View connected to data stores
residing on a NetApp FAS2020. With as many as 250 users logging into the system
at any given time, the VMs supporting the teachers and students experienced
very high latency and frequent boot storms that occurred during the first 15
minutes of each class session throughout the school day. During these peak
times, users also experienced problems saving their work and potential data
corruption.

Facing the
time-consuming and expensive option of implementing new performance
storage filers, Belchertown School District’s IT department decided instead to
try to solve the problem using a NAS Optimization solution from Avere.

"Avere eliminated the boot storm and turned
15 minutes of logging in per class into three to four minutes with no more
write errors or corrupted files," said Scott Karen, the school
district’s Director of Technology. "Overall
latency is no longer an issue and it didn’t require me to rethink and
re-engineer my storage network… It was a more cost-effective and time-effective
way to get those old, slow filers to behave like new, high-end machines. In
fact, we call the Avere cluster ‘the magic boxes’ because of how quickly and
easily they solved our problems."

"Forklift upgrades to storage servers are an
expensive and often unnecessary solution to an application performance problem,"
said Ron Bianchini, Avere President and CEO. "Avere’s NAS Optimization solutions are VMware Ready certified and
give organizations like the Belchertown School District the ability to easily
scale application performance in a virtualized environment while protecting the
investments they have already made in their infrastructure."