Powering college’s data-intensive workload

Like most higher education institutions, Emerson College is very cost conscious. Andrew Feland, director of information technology, and Frankie Frain, manager of networks and systems, wanted to consolidate physical servers using VMware server-virtualization technology to reduce cost and improve efficiency. They also needed to replace an ageing and expensive-to-maintain Fibre Channel (FC) storage area network (SAN).

Frain understood that the benefits realized through server virtualization would be offset by their existing complex, expensive storage, so he developed a clear vision to restructure the company’s infrastructure. He knew he had to find a new shared-storage array that would be affordable, easy to use and reliable, and that would offer high performance. The team was in search of a system that would lower their support cost and provide a flexible, scale-out system that could meet different performance needs. The college looked at solutions from major storage vendors but found them to be complex, expensive and not as flexible as Frain required.

To fulfill its requirements, Emerson deployed two Coraid EtherDrive SRX storage arrays. EtherDrive SRX is a new class of storage array that provides storage over Ethernet, allowing IT administrators to respond to complex storage needs quickly and reliably. The array is designed from the ground up for performance, scalability and simplicity. EtherDrive SRX high-performance block-storage arrays enable a scale-out Ethernet SAN architecture that is ideally suited to virtualization, cloud and big-data environments.

"Coraid EtherDrive provides an ideal mix of flexibility and high performance, which is crucial for supporting our faculty and students across the campus," said Feland. "We are passionate about supporting the work of our users. As we look ahead to implementing university-wide cloud architecture, Coraid's platform delivers the performance and storage economics that allow us to approve more projects."

Coraid’s Ethernet Block Storage offered a flexible, simple, modular storage platform that did not require any training and could be installed in one day. Unlike Fibre Channel infrastructures, Coraid’s solution did not have to be configured or reconfigured, and it enabled Emerson to work within its existing VMware and OS environment. The Coraid storage looks like local storage to VMware servers, thus making it easier for users to log in and control their storage. And because EtherDrive SRX is very simple and easy to implement, it eliminates the many steps required by complex storage configuration.