Qsan Technology achieves top marks

Qsan Technology Inc continues to expand its install base with Glasshouse College, where it recently deployed an AegisSAN P300Q storage array. The system will allow the West Midlands further education college for young adults with learning disabilities to easily store up to 64TB of data. To date Glasshouse has only used two out of the 12TB of allocated capacity to store emails, an SQL database, some virtual data and other mixed files.
Glasshouse College, in Stourbridge, is one of three independent specialist further education colleges operated by the Ruskin Mill Trust, which provides practical skill therapeutic education for people aged 16 to 25 years who have a range of learning difficulties, including autistic spectrum disorders.

Following a number of changes, the storage infrastructure at Glasshouse was no longer meeting the demands of the college: the new IT room alone, featuring a significant amount of digital imaging equipment, had dramatically increased the need for storage capacity. Additional applications, such as the database of confidential student records, meant that its legacy systems had reached full capacity at around one terabyte.

A grant for IT spend from the Ian Karten Charitable Trust, which funds the Karten Network, a network of IT centres for disabled people, provided Glasshouse with the opportunity to investigate a possible solution. The College turned to Stone Computers, which has been providing Glasshouse consultancy for over 14 years, to advise. The key criteria for selection of a storage solution were high performance, scalability, data security, ease-of-use and integration with Microsoft software.

Stone Computers recommended the Qsan AegisSAN P300Q IP SAN disk array for speed, cost and usability, and a Qsan JBOD J300Q for scalability, thanks to its potential to expand up to 64TB. The P300Q key features include an inbuilt Intel IOP CPU, a dual active controller, hardware redundancy and an easy-to-use management tool, with the added boon of a hardware-level BBM (battery backup module) for advanced data protection.
Stone Computers set up the hardware, which was subsequently configured by Qsan, and, thanks to the user-friendly web interface, the systems were up and running with plenty of time to spare before the deadline of two days.

Andrew Faulkes, technical services manager at Glasshouse College, said, “For at least two years, we were operating a ‘one-in, one-out’ approach to our storage; I had to keep asking the staff to delete redundant information to enable us to store new data, and it was becoming an increasing challenge, a daily concern. Data protection is also very important for us as we hold highly confidential student information. We have experienced such a huge shift in process over the last eighteen months; we now have to document everything our students do, and nothing encapsulates that better than pictures and videos. The Qsan system has exceeded our expectations. It is great value for money, offers impressive data protection and scalability and is so easy to use I almost forget about it. The technical support from Qsan is second to none; with responsive and smart engineers who prioritise your call the first time you make it.”

Bartek Mytnik, sales manager EMEA at Qsan Technology, said, “This is an implementation which illustrates perfectly the business value which can be unlocked by future proofing your storage environment, and we are delighted to see a Qsan product impacting such a huge change in the way an SMB is able to work. We are particularly delighted to hear Glasshouse College’s positive feedback around ease-of-use and scalability as we continue to strive for the highest standards in the product feature sets.”

Senior technical services managers at Glasshouse College, Paul Jackson and Richard MacBeth, were also instrumental in the product’s specification and implementation. Richard Macbeth commented, “A major benefit of this is that we will be able to virtualise our file and SQL server earlier than we would have been able otherwise because we now have the capacity. There are several colleges within the group and all run systems independently, although perhaps the next opportunity could be to connect the office systems up under one domain.”

Matt Dennis, account manager at Qsan’s reseller Stone Computers said, “The efficiencies gained by increasing the college’s storage capacity are already evident and this project provides a stepping stone to a more cohesive virtualised strategy for the group. We are seeing sophisticated storage systems like the P300Q from Qsan as a key catalyst for change in small organisations; even those like Glasshouse College, which are not technology-led, are making the connection between IT and operational change.”