Several Educational Institutions Turn to DataCore

DataCore Software Corporation, announced that a growing number of educational institutions are deploying its Hyper-converged Virtual SAN and scalable storage services platform SANsymphony to address mission-critical IT challenges, increase performance and reduce infrastructure costs.

Institutes of higher learning in the Americas, including University of Chicago, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Centre Francophone de Toronto, Centro Comprensivo de Cáncer de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, as well as others in Europe and Asia including Oxford University, École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA ParisTech), Murdoch University (Australia), National Taiwan University, and Nanjing University (China) have invested in DataCore solutions.

Beyond the education institutions, DataCore’s hyper-converged solutions are being used in a range of local school systems and other educational organizations.

“We are thrilled with DataCore’s performance and what it does on the storage side of the virtual infrastructure. From a cost-perspective, it is a complete home run in that it is vendor-agnostic,” commented Dr. Guy J. Le Vaillant, assistant superintendent for human resources and instructional technology, Plainedge Union Free School District. “I can run any application and take any storage, deploy it behind the DataCore solution and it comes online – and is super-charged with intelligence, performance and a single management interface.“

Hyper-converged Infrastructure Delivers
Faster and More Reliable Architecture for Key Applications
Just as enterprises need better performance and higher SLAs from their key applications, educational institutions need the same. Many new DataCore customers in education have implemented Hyper-converged Virtual SAN, including Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, University of Chicago, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. These higher education institutions have deployed Hyper-converged virtual SAN to cost-efficiently deliver a highly-available and performing infrastructure for virtualized applications.

“I decided to convert to a hyper-converged environment to reduce our data center CAPEX,” stated Keith Kunkel, senior information processing consultant, Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “We currently have 42 servers with 27 of them being physical and the remainder virtual.  When this project is completed, the physical count will be reduced to 11 with 14 virtual servers running on two Hyper-V Fail Over Clusters. The other factor that influenced my decision was the fact that most of the physical servers were beyond their warranty period and would require more maintenance to keep them running. Simply put, by selecting DataCore we save money and can leverage hyper-converged infrastructure to scale our applications with the smallest possible footprint.“

The net result of adopting DataCore for all of these deployments is greater consolidation savings, better performance and higher availability for databases, VDI, and other virtualized applications.

Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solution benefits include:

• Fast response time
• Highest availability with the fewest nodes
• Lowest TCO to scale-up or scale-out
• Single platform for virtualized and non-virtualized applications
  

Throughout 2016 a sampling of educational entities that are new to SANsymphony software-defined storage include Assumption College, Jefferson Parish Public School System, Northport-East Northport Schools, Plainedge Union Free School District, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Uniondale Union Free School District, and University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

SANsymphony provides a scalable storage services platform designed to maximize the performance, availability, and utilization of storage assets, no matter how diverse they may be or what topology the customer has chosen.

Software-defined solution offers users following benefits:

• Applications run faster and uninterrupted.
• Pool existing storage and protect data.
• Centralize and automate storage management.
  

The net result is better performance and availability for databases, VDI, and other applications, both virtualized and physical, at a much lower cost (both CAPEX and OPEX).

“One of the goals of the university’s IT department is to provide our students, faculty, and staff uninterrupted access to computing resources 24×7, 365 days of the year,” explained Long Le, director of computing and network services, University of the Sciences. “In conjunction with our redundant network design, DataCore has given us the capability to seamlessly continue operations of our virtual environment to the entire campus, even if one of our data centers is offline for planned maintenance or during an unplanned outage. This allows us to ensure our users can have access to the tools they need to be successful.“

Benefits these institutions are receiving include the ability to:

• Maximize the value from storage investments, current and future.
• Optimize performance of latency-sensitive applications.
• Automate and centralize storage management.
• Enable ‘zero downtime, zero touch’ availability of data.
  

Productivity and Flexibility Driving Momentum
“For schools of all sizes, it’s about maximizing IT infrastructure performance, availability and utilization by productively using smart software to virtualize and add the needed flexibility to meet changing demands,” said George Teixeira, CEO and co-founder, DataCore. “Educational institutions’ IT infrastructure is complex and decentralized. Additionally, their high-performance applications require predictable performance and scalability for a variety of mission-critical workloads such Oracle and SQL Server databases. By offering the best price-performance on the market, DataCore can ensure industry-best response times – making institutions’ IT faster and meaning their infrastructure can be massively consolidated, eliminating complexity.“

Additionally, many existing institutions have expanded their use of DataCore throughout 2016, including Midwestern University, Rogue Community College, Santa Barbara County Education, Scottsdale Community College, St. Paul Public Schools, and The University of Utah, as well as other laudable institutions in the US, such as Colby-Sawyer College, Florida Atlantic University, Nova Southeastern University, and Washington University.