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District Automates File Compression To Ease Storage Demands

• By Scott Aronowitz
• 11/17/10

Antelope Valley Union High School District of Palmdale, CA is turning to automated file optimization to ease the burden that's been placed on its servers. The district has chosen NXPowerLite from Neuxpower to optimize the file storage capacity on its district network. The software, which automates file optimization, reduces bloat, and reports on storage use, has already recovered more than 30 percent of the district's primary storage, according to a spokesperson.

AVUHSD, which enrolls more than 23,600 students in 12 high school facilities, two adult education campuses, and an occupational program, employs 12 large file servers. A recent assessment of the network revealed that large Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, etc.) and JPEG image files were eating up an enormous portion of its storage space.

After the initial optimization run using the software, which required about four days to complete, AVUHSD was able to identify the bloated documents, presentations, and other files that were causing storage management problems and significantly slowing backup. The district could then optimize and batch large files and folders while retaining the visual integrity of image files, which ultimately freed up 30 percent to 40 percent of network storage space.

"Backups were taking up to six hours at some of our sites," said Dan Stewart, director of information systems for the district. "Even with hardware being upgraded every two years, we were unable to keep up with demand. We knew that if we continued down the same path, we might lose control of our data growth. NXPowerLite gives us smaller, optimized files that not only save on storage space, but are more usable and easier to e-mail than the originals."

Further information and a 30-day free trial of NXPowerLite Desktop Edition is available here.