|
An Interview with Don Magee, Systems Architect, Southwestern Michigan College
Southwestern Michigan
College
- 2 locations in Michigan
- 3000 students growing rapidly
- Leading programs in nursing and automotive
Challenges
- Need for robust DR
- Migration nightmares
Using StorSimple
- VMware Ready Storage for Primary, Archival, Backup and DR
- File Shares for users and departments
- Virtual Desktop program
Security, Performance and Rewriting Applications
- AES-256 encryption adequately met security requirements
- Performance – Working Set on Solid State Drives increased performance
- No Rewrite of Applications – Simple migration of VM’s due to iSCSI interface
Retired Systems and Scale of Storage
- Magnitude 4000 Xiotech SAN
- Sun 7110, 7210 Primary VMware storage
- 4TB VMware volumes, 1TB user data plus cloud backup and archives
Virtualization and Cloud Providers
- 85% Virtualization
- Virtualized Active Directory, Novell Authentication, Web Server, Print Server, File Server, Classrooms, ERP
- 4*vSphere, VMware and vCenter, 72 VM’s
- Virtual Desktop scaling to 90 desktops
- Windows Azure
Benefits of Using StorSimple
- Automatic archiving removes the need for months of migration
- Simple management
- Simple Disaster Recovery
Why StorSimple
- Great support 24*7
- VMware High-Availability
- Simple to try and evaluate
- Cloud Leadership
Lessons Learned
- Don’t be afraid of the cloud and losing control
- Migrations nightmares go away
- Cloud strategy requires local and tiered cloud storage
|
Southwestern Michigan is spread over two campuses in Dowagiac and Niles Michigan. It is a learner centered college offering unparalleled occupational skills training in numerous technical, business and health-care fields geared toward preparing students for high-wage, high-skill, high-demand occupations.
Why Enterprise Cloud Storage
Southwestern Michigan College first started evaluating the cloud and cloud storage to get robust Disaster Recovery (DR) that supporting it VMware environment and file shares where individual item or file level recovery was important.
Using StorSimple
Southwestern Michigan College initially started using looking at cloud storage for DR. After evaluating the system it now has three StorSimple appliances that manage the entire VMware environment for primary, archival, backup and offsite DR. Other key uses are supporting users home directories and departmental home directories across both campuses for the rapidly growing student base. There is a new and growing Virtual Desktop program using Pano Logic and StorSimple.
The Three Myths of Cloud Computing
Southwestern Michigan College looked at security, performance and if
applications needed to be rewritten to use the cloud. The College had
previously used Fiber Channel (FC). StorSimple’s iSCSI support meant that VM’s could be simply be migrated in a VMware Ready certified way with increased performance due to the working set management and automatic tiering. Before any data is written to the cloud it is deduplicated, compressed and encoded with AES-256 encryption military grade encryption, which adequately met Southwestern Michigan College’s security requirements.
Retired Systems and Scale of Storage
StorSimple enabled the retirement of the Magnitude 4000 Xiotech SAN and the Sun 7110 and 7210 primary storage for VMware. Currently the storage including Cloud Snapshots and Cloud Clones exceeds 10TB.
Virtualization and Cloud Providers
The environment is almost 85% virtualized. Virtualized applications include: Active Directory, Novell Authentication (being migrated to Active Directory), Web Server, Print Server, File Server, Classrooms and ERP. The environment uses 4 vSphere servers, VMware and vCenter.
Benefits from Using StorSimple
Previously Southwestern Michigan College had spent months migrating data. Now deduplication and automatic tiering removed the need for migration and archival. Management and instant provisioning of volumes is simple though a web-base interface offering simple BIG Data management and Disaster Recovery.
Why Choose StorSimple
StorSimple has great support 24*7. We called them at midnight on a Friday night and had a response in 5 minutes. When we had a major storage issues with our VMware systems we were able to migrate the VM’s to StorSimple to offer continued service. Those VM’s are now permanently on StorSimple.
Key Lessons Learned
The primary lesson learned is don’t be afraid of the cloud and losing control. The reality is with both local and automatically tiered cloud storage you get control, high performance and high-availability. In addition with instant thin provision of large volumes migration problems go away. Primary deduplication can dramatically reduce VMware storage requirements.
|
