Storage Lessons

Video surveillance is used throughout district buildings for student and faculty safety, consuming 250 terabytes of storage. Document scanning is used to electronically save previously paper-based records about students and staff. Scanned images use about 2.5TB of storage.

The virtualization project has far-reaching implications. Virtualization is touted as a way to flexibly manage server resources and configure a network, allowing server resources to be dynamically assigned to support users and applications. The district created nearly 100 virtual machines on about eight physical servers. The strategy lets students and faculty gain access to their documents and files regardless of the computer they're working from or logged into. The VMs use about 10TB of data.

Virtualization dovetails with the benefits of centralized storage. “Once we put centralized storage in place in conjunction with virtual machines, it really revolutionized the way our infrastructure team does their job,” Troudy says. “Now we're able to provision a server and storage basically at will.”

Corona-Norco selected Nexsan SATABeast products on the strength of their capacity, features and pricing. SATABeast units feature exceptional density: 42 drives at 2TB per drive can be packed into a single 4-unit rack. The district now has five “Beasts” and expects to purchase more in the future.

The products also feature direct high-speed Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity, along with quick provisioning of storage capacity, Troudy says. All were factors in selecting Nexsan. Plus, pricing was critical.

“Their pricing model is phenomenal – you buy the array, no software licenses or keys are needed; you get three years of hardware support out of the box, with software upgrades for the life of the product,” he adds.

At the same time, the district is using EMC Avamar technology to back up critical applications and services automatically. The centralized storage is located in district offices, with 1 gigabit-per-second connectivity from each facility to the central storage pool over dark fiber. The district expects to fully phase out its direct-attached, decentralized storage in about 18 months, Troudy says.

The Offsite Cloud

While the networked storage model is working as expected at Corona-Norco, not all districts are embracing centralization.

At the Riverside Unified School District in California, an upgrade to a new learning management and content management system sparked a decision to store all of the district's data offsite in the cloud.

Cloud computing, especially cloud storage, is widely viewed as a technology that can help make infrastructure more flexible – scaling up or down as applications dictate – without the hardware and maintenance investment required to manage storage.

Jay McPhail, director of instructional technology for Riverside's 42,000-student district, says the move was part of an overall philosophy to make it easy for students and faculty to access computing resources. Among other features, the learning management system includes a mobile application that can run on devices such as the iPhone and iPad.

“When we talk to vendors, they've got to provide cloud-based resources onto any device,” McPhail says. “If they're not able to go that way, we're not using that vendor.”

In fact, district-owned mobile computing gear can be checked out by students, and they are encouraged to use mobile devices.

“We encourage [students] to use them as their [personal] devices: we want it to become theirs,” says McPhail. “We want the same thing in storage. We want a vibrant storage space that can expand/contract simply and easily; we just pick up the phone and ask.”

Jeff Boles, senior analyst at the Taneja Group, says the elasticity in storage capacity that the cloud promises is for real. “Cloud solutions are built on a different architecture than traditional storage, so you're no longer limited by physical resources and can scale out much better,” Boles says. “You can turn up capacity very easily.”

McPhail says 42,000 users in the Riverside district have access to the cloud, with about 15,000 users actively using the system. The district expects to have completely switched to cloud-based storage by 2012.