Saint Michael’s College Selects Nasuni

Nasuni Corp. announced that Saint Michael’s College, a private liberal arts college located on a 400-acre campus near Burlington, VT, is using the Nasuni Service to provide more than 3,000 users with fast and secure access to more than 12TB of operational and academic data.

The college’s IT organization replaced its existing storage infrastructure with the Nasuni Service in an effort to provide an higher level of support to students, faculty and staff even as the amount of data on its network continues to grow exponentially.

Prior to deploying the Nasuni Service, the IT team at St. Michael’s faced two big challenges. The amount of data it had to manage was growing rapidly, putting an increasing strain on the college’s network resources. In addition, while a BC and DR Project completed several years ago had ensured the redundancy of all critical systems, the cost of scaling the college’s storage infrastructure at the production data center and the failover was exorbitant.

“We always try to maintain a balance where four of us are managing our data centers and networks across the 50 buildings we support on campus so that the remainder of our team can focus on addressing users’ daily needs,” said Joe Pawlaczyk, associate director of the IT data center, St. Michael’s. “But it was clear we couldn’t continue to provide that level of service and also keep our costs in check if something didn’t change. It was far too expensive to purchase the hardware we continually had to buy to scale. Plus, as the amount of data we had grew, between two SANs, tape and additional disk storage, we couldn’t back everything up in 24 hours. And even after we backed everything up, recovering files for our users was complex, time consuming and difficult.“

In addition, the constraints placed on the storage infrastructure all too often prevented the IT team from supporting new data-intensive projects that required additional storage capacity.

“While we always did our best to predict how much capacity we would need, the costs were so high to scale, it invariably meant that we couldn’t provide storage support for some projects,” adds Shawn Umansky, network engineer, Saint Michael’s College. “That reality was at odds with our mission to help all of our departments in any way we can.“

The IT team looked to the cloud for a solution, with several caveats. Performance for end-users was crucial. The solution also needed to be easy to manage, intuitive, cost effective and secure, with the college maintaining control over all of its data. Finally, the team at St. Michael’s wanted a partner with a track record for support.

In light of these criteria, St. Michael’s chose and deployed the Nasuni Service. Because it caches the most frequently used data inside the Nasuni Filer appliances on-site, users noticed no difference in performance. In addition, the Nasuni Service backups the environment as often as every 60s. and recovery of any data, from word processing documents to multi-trabyte data volumes, requires just a few mouse clicks – enabling IT department to do in minutes what used to take hours or days.

Scalability also ceased to be an issue. When the need for more storage capacity arises, IT contacts Nasuni to request more capacity, which can be available in minutes. And with built-in anti-virus support and all encryption keys held only by St. Michael’s, the security of the college’s data is never in question.

“Now we pay for the storage we use and add more capacity when needed,” Pawlaczyk said. “And backup and recovery is a snap. Support is likewise fantastic. If I phone with a question, Nasuni’s engineers a,er immediately. Most importantly our ,a is safe and our end users are happy. We wanted a storage partner that would address our needs and Nasuni delivered. We don’t have to think about storage anymore because the Nasuni Service just plain works.“

“The days of perpetually investing in big iron and spinning disks are over,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO, Nasuni. “The Nasuni Service transforms storage by delivering infinite scalability while simultaneously making automatic backup, instantaneous restore and centralized data management a reality. Storage doesn’t ave to be a headache for IT.“

Video interview with Joe Pawlaczyk and Shawn Umansky