Toronto District School Board Chooses EMC VNX

EMC Corporation announced that The Toronto District School board (TDSB), the
largest school board in Canada and fourth largest district in North America,
has transformed its 325TB storage infrastructure with EMC VNX unified storage
and EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems for backup and recovery with
the help of EMC Residency Services.

Through storage consolidation, Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization and a FLASH 1st
strategy, TDSB, running the Microsoft Productivity Suite, is achieving
improvements in performance and efficiency while enhancing student learning and
teacher collaboration.

Leveraging a FLASH 1st strategy to combines a small amount of Flash capacity
with the FAST Suite, has transformed the way TDSB configures its IT
environment. As TDSB grows, it expects a 38% reduction in Flash tier costs with
new storage efficiency enhancements.

Customer Benefits:

Reduced Footprint &
Energy Costs: As a result of server consolidation
with Hyper-V and a transition from an all SAS configuration to a FLASH 1st
strategy, TDSB saw a reduction in capacity requirements by 32% and a decrease
in energy expenses by 22%.

• Better Performance for
  Microsoft Applications: TDSB’s FLASH 1st strategy
  has resulted in an overall storage performance increase of 21%, powering faster
  Microsoft SQL transactions and improved collaboration among staff and students.
• Increased Backup
  Efficiency: Using EMC Data Domain deduplication
  storage systems, TDSB’s backup storage requirements have been decreased by
  over 90%.

Customer Challenges and
Solution:

TDSB is comprised of 600+ schools, 250,000 students
and 40,000 staff members. With tight budgets and rapid data growth, TDSB needed
to lower its cost per TB and increase storage density without requiring
additional data center space in order to continue to provide a high level of IT
services to faculty, staff and students. It faced challenges with its backup
windows, which were running into school hours and impacting performance.

Residents from EMC Global Services provided support and
knowledge transfer, enabling TDSB to transform its IT infrastructure with
VNX. Previous disparate block-level and NAS were consolidated onto a single,
unified VNX solution, running its applications, including Exchange,
SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint, Office, OCS, and Dot Net Nuke (CMS) as well as
SAP. EMC Residency Services helped speed time to value of TDSB’s new technology
implementation and improved the management and support of its information
infrastructure.

By employing a FLASH 1st strategy on their VNX, TDSB has seen an
increase in performance and a substantial improvement in storage efficiency.
Previously, the IT team had to purchase an abundance of FC drives, with some
being underutilized while others were over-subscribed.

With Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) and FAST Cache
along with a mix of Flash and high-capacity, cost effective disk drives, the
data is automatically placed on the most appropriate drive type, saving valuable
resource time and smoothing out unexpected bursts in activity. TDSB credits the
FLASH 1st strategy and Hyper-V virtualization for the enhanced management
simplicity and overall reduction in both CapEx and OpEx.

In addition, TDSB replaced its tape backup environment with EMC Data
Domain deduplication storage systems, resulting in reduced backup times and a
decrease in backup storage requirements by over 90%.

Peter Singh, senior manager, IT Operations, Toronto District School board,
said: "EMC’s VNX unified storage has
the best performance and efficiency at a very cost-effective price. It
integrates with Microsoft Hyper-V, which is crucial to our cloud strategy, and
with its higher performance, automated storage tiering, and thin provisioning,
VNX was a no-brainer."

"Implementing a ‘FLASH
1st’ strategy on VNX helped us attain a greener data center, reducing our
storage space by 32% and decreasing our power cost by 22%. We actually received
a rebate from our electric company because of the savings."

"EMC’s Residency offering
was one of the best services we’ve used from any vendor. To have an EMC expert
on site, working as an extension of our staff, was priceless. It allowed us to
move forward with the project much more quickly than doing everything ourselves."

Zain Bhamjee, system architect, Toronto District School board, said:
"With a storage infrastructure
that’s reached 325 TB and growing, we’re always looking for ways to leverage
our IT dollars to bring the most value to our teachers and students. EMC’s comprehensive
array of storage, software, and services are enabling us to transform and
achieve the most efficiency, performance, and scalability we’ve seen yet.
Additionally, the new features for the VNX family, including lower starting
costs for Flash configurations, are exciting additions to these existing
advantages–we’re looking forward to reaping the cost and efficiency benefits
of these new capabilities.

"Tasks that once took
five clicks now get done in one with Unisphere. We’re supporting our 325-TB
storage environment with less than one and a half FTEs. Most shops would need
three to five FTEs to manage an infrastructure our size."