Storage | News
Bellarmine College Prep Deploys Low-Cost SAN with Off-the-Shelf Hardware
Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose,
CA has deployed a software-defined storage system to reduce storage costs and
provide campus-wide redundancy.
A few years ago, the private secondary school realized it needed a shared
storage system to handle the increasing amount of data it was storing, and it
also needed faster performance, higher availability and centralized management.
They received a donation of a traditional storage area network, but after that
system expired the school couldn't afford to replace it. Instead, the IT team
built its own storage infrastructure running DataCore
SANsymphony-V on SuperMicro-based servers with LSI SAS/SATA controllers and
various off-the-shelf hard drives, according to information on DataCore's site.
Bellarmine's do-it-yourself SAN is a cost-effective and flexible solution
that gives them the freedom to use any hypervisor, storage or server platform.
It also enables them to purchase additional hard drives as needed, so they can
take advantage of faster, larger, lower-cost drives as they come on the market.
According to DataCore, SANsymphony-V has also enabled to school to improve
performance and reduce storage-related downtime by splitting the SAN so one node
and its storage are located in the school's primary data center, while the other
node and its storage are located in the school's secondary data center.
"Having the ability to scale and work across multiple nodes campus-wide and
to be able to fail over as needed for upgrades/maintenance/expansion — even
during regular business hours — is a real luxury," said Chris Carey, IT director
at Bellarmine, in a prepared statement. "DataCore SANsymphony-V hasn't been down
since we installed it."
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.