DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, today announced that
Thunderbird School of Global Management, the oldest and largest graduate
school for international business in the USA, has overcome its most
pressing IT challenge – a dependence on expensive hardware – with a
flexible software-defined storage architecture made possible by DataCore
SANsymphony-V.
“Due to the software-defined storage approach of DataCore’s
SANsymphony-V, we are free to choose any hardware and no longer
locked-in to a storage vendor, which gives us greater purchasing power,"
said Johan Reinalda, senior director network infrastructure and support
services, Thunderbird School of Global Management. “This solution has
allowed us to take a cost-effective approach when addressing our storage
need. Additionally, functionality such as DataCore’s auto-tiering and
self-tuning capabilities has led to performance increases in improving
response times to VM within our VMware environment.”
No Dependence on Expensive Hardware – with Software-Defined Storage
from DataCore
Thunderbird faced the IT challenge of being dependent on aging SAN
controller infrastructure from NetApp, as well as various storage
devices that were facing “end of life.” The school’s IT organization
also sought to open up its purchasing options and free itself from this
hardware and system vendor lock-in. Data storage growth rates were high
and rising– so there was also the need to cost-effectively deal with the
challenges of increasing growth and need for more capacity.
The institution was looking for a way to avoid the high cost of
upgrading under its existing NetApp solution, which was deployed as a
metro-cluster. Thunderbird wanted to protect its existing investment and
therefore still has NetApp running, however, IT has been able to
modernize its overall storage and has moved all mission-critical storage
to a software-based DataCore SANsymphony-V storage virtualization
platform. In fact, the DataCore implementation cost was only a fraction
of what Thunderbird would have spent for the upgrade path from the
incumbent vendor.
“We saved 60 percent on our storage upgrade – based on the quote from
our original vendor, NetApp,” explained Reinalda. “We replaced all parts
of the SAN – a total revamp, including disks, whereas the previous
vendor option was to replace mostly the controllers. This was the
overwhelming reason we went the DataCore route – that and no vendor
lock-in for storage.”
Realizing the Benefits & Eliminating Downtime: Defining Storage Its
Own Way at Thunderbird
In addition to a whopping 60 percent cost savings relative to the
entrenched SAN vendor, the agility and flexibility the IT staff now has
through DataCore – as far as scaling and expanding its infrastructure to
best meet the organization’s needs – is now the norm at Thunderbird. For
instance, system administrators can now add multi-vendor storage behind
SANsymphony-V and have a single unified management interface.
The IT department is reporting a three to four times performance
increase in response times of the storage for its virtual machines
(VMs). Thunderbird is not using high-end storage behind SANsymphony-V,
but they are using DataCore’s auto-tiering feature along with solid
state disks (SSDs). The institution has embraced a high availability
(HA) implementation in which SANsymphony-V is synchronously mirrored
across two different data centers that are metro-clustered across the
campus and as a result the IT team can perform upgrades without any
downtime to its VMware “internal could” environment.
Reinalda emphasized that DataCore has ushered in a new day as far as
making its storage infrastructure more resilient through storage that is
software-defined. “The HA environment means better uptime. We have
experienced no downtime in the six months we have been ‘live’ with
SANsymphony-V,” he noted.
A complete case study concerning the DataCore deployment at Thunderbird
School of Global Management is available here: http://datacore.com/testimonials/thunderbird.