LeftHand Networks, the leading provider of highly available iSCSI SANs that optimize virtual environments, today announced that its customer, Los Angeles Valley College (LA Valley College), has been recognized by IDG's Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) as the winner of Storage Networking World’s (SNW) Fall 2008 Best Practices in Storage in the category of Innovation and Promise. The award recognizes LA Valley College for its use of LeftHand Networks’ storage networking technology to help transform its monolithic infrastructure into its current “Virtual First” policy and virtual IT environment. The award also marks the second consecutive year that a LeftHand Networks’ customer has received the Best Practices in Storage honor.
LA Valley College is one of nine colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District, and is the largest community college system in the United States. With a mission of providing affordable, accessible and practical education opportunities, LA Valley College has embraced an innovative and forward-thinking approach to its IT operations and investments. Recognizing the power of virtualization, LA Valley College was an early adopter and started transforming its infrastructure in 2002.
“With virtualization technologies and solutions from LeftHand Networks, we have successfully and cost-effectively deployed a reliable Exchange email system for 20,000+ users as well as multi-site disaster recovery solutions that maximize IT effectiveness, minimize costs, optimize limited space and are easy to deploy and manage,” said Jorge Mata, chief information officer (provisional), Los Angeles Community College District.
· Achieve greater data availability
· Improve disaster recovery, business continuity and business agility
· Introduce a shared backup system across the entire campus
· Incorporate blade server technology to reduce space needed for servers
· Enable remote management of the data center
· Lower its power consumption
· Save significantly in software, hardware and support costs
LA Valley College’s IT team didn’t stop there. “We are already looking ahead to how virtualization will drive next generation data centers – creating on-demand, lights-out data centers that will incorporate leading-edge technologies and remote management capabilities that will well serve our students, faculty and staff,” added Mata.
“This year's honorees represent a variety of organizations, all of which have unlocked the true value of networked storage and its strategic importance to their businesses,” said Ron Milton, executive vice president of Computerworld. “The honorees have demonstrated continued excellence in the use of storage technology and have overcome extraordinary business challenges.”
A wide range of IT end user companies and organizations responded to the initial call for nominations. Twenty finalists in four categories including Innovation and Promise; Selecting and Deploying Storage Networks; Planning, Designing and Building a Strategic Storage Infrastructure; and Storage Reliability and Data Recovery were evaluated by a panel of enterprise and storage industry experts. All finalist evaluations were based on case study submissions that profiled the company, its IT department and storage challenges as well as application deployment details, summaries of the key technology used, the process by which it made its SAN selection and measureable solutions benefits.
The awards were announced during a special awards ceremony at SNW Fall 2008 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Conference Center in Dallas, Texas.