Palmer’s CollegeSTORAGE EXPERIENCE

About us• Medium sized 6th Form -2200 Full time students- 180 staff.

• Single site- Apart from separate Sports center.

• 800-900 Devices connected.

• Common Storage Issues – We need more space!

Existing Kit and our Dilemma• Approximately 20 physical Servers- IBM with some virtualisation

backend servers - conservative with data Always wanted what was deemed one of the best — fired for buying IBM?

• Our IBM DS range Fibre channel SAN- not enough storage for Virtualisation.

• Loved virtualisation - Visit to Havering College & showed datacentre with ‘live vmotion’.

• Core HP Switch kit also needing an update

• Dilemma on how we were going to afford kit fast enough for large scale virtualisation plus a large increase of storage?

Decisions-Decisions..• Contacts made with Technical IT companies on what they thought

would be the best solution.

• Mostly the Big players i.e. EMC, IBM, HP, Dell but also spoke regarding Hitachi.

• Started getting in prices but mostly iscsi…Ouch!—Would iscsi cope? FC overly complex and out of price range?

• Colchester 6th Form – Chris mentioned his issues with their current SAN infrastructure and how it would cost £££’s to improve – more disks - hated the vendor lock in. Support costs.

• First mention of CORAID at an RSC Tech Managers Meeting.

Coraid and my worries!• We immediately started to take a look at Coraid in some detail –

Visit to Colchester as they had an SR unit setup in their Lab- visited IPEXPO

• Tech guys thought it was great – Very fast lots of IO – Very simple to set up, instruction ‘book’ just 12 pages.- list of commands- no GUI- Mix & match disks in same unit. Protocol –AoE – ATA over Ethernet (not FC not iscsi)

• Found a 2nd hand SR series and tried in our lab.

• Where was I going to get finance from ?- SALIX Green Computing.

• Never heard of Coraid-Too small? No UK base at the time- not on Vmware official list!!!– Spoke to 3rd party IT company who was positive about them. Spoke directly with Coraid in US.

Purchase & Installation • Purchased two SRX3200, 2 xVRX (mirroring) + foc SRX2800 –

IBM Host servers x 3. 10 Gig HBA’s .All installed within a day- 2nd day PtoV conversion.

• Budget allowed for 10Gb Switch gear at core to handle Vmware infrastructure.

• 2nd SRX unit used in secondary data centre in Sports centre for DR & maintenance…eventually dropped DR contract.

• Utilized ‘Free’ SRX 2800 to run a small Vmware View deployment of 80 Win 7 Desktops- 4 SSD’s.

Our Experience

• Two days before Staff & students arrived back decided to install Vsphere 4.1

• One day before…Oh $£^!!

• Calls to Vmware (no issues with Coraid support), IBM and Coraid (afternoon)

• Hotfix spotted by us – and the culprit was ??????????? – never get..

• Has run flawlessly since 1st day of full production.

• Kept it Simple with Coraid.

Summary• “We initially looked at Coraid because of the low TCO but we

were then blown away by the performance and the simplicity” – Nick Dixon, Tech sales director, Axis first US – We saved ££££’s on deploying Coraid in comparison to traditional vendor.

• Do not just look at the big players- lots of smaller start ups out there.

• Coraid have newer faster arrays since our install. www.coraid.com.

• Storage vendors that have come to my attention since our Coraid Install :