Solid state disks
storage news
|
Hard disk drives Solid state disks storage news |
|
| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| The Hill School uses ADIC's
StorNext NAS appliance to simplify its data management tasks and make its
networked educational materials easier to store and use. One of the country's most prestigious private secondary schools, The Hill School is an institution that combines a century-old tradition of academic excellence with an equally strong commitment to innovation-where Latin, Greek, and calculus share the curriculum with multi-media publishing and web development. Each of the school's 500 students and all of its faculty are equipped with Dell laptop computers, its network connects them with high speed Gibabit Ethernet technology, and all the courses leverage digital technology to make teaching and learning more effective. The Hill School is continually finding new ways to make technology support education. The school's two-year-old program to digitize all its video materials is a prime example. "Digital video lasts longer, is easier to edit, store and access, and allows for interactivity-critical for effective learning," explains Rick Bauer, The Hill School's CIO. Today, all of the school's interactive materials for French, German, Spanish, and Chinese, along with much of the school's other video resources and records of its own institutional history, are in digital format. The size of the digital video files and their rapid growth, however, presented a challenge for the IS department-the school's program has already amassed more than 500GB of content and is expecting more. |
| |||
| "Initially, we burned CDs
and put as many files as we could on our video server, but as the collection
grew we kept having to add capacity-expensive and time consuming-and we still
had to manage hundred of CDs. It was a real pain. We knew that
Network Attach Storage
would be easier to install and maintain, but we had so much data that the costs
would have been much too high-especially when we're dealing with static data
that we don't need instant access to." ADIC's StorNext NAS appliance presented an elegant solution. StorNext provides very high capacity storage (the Workgroup model The Hill School uses has almost 2 TB) at very low cost by combining tape technology as the primary storage medium with active disk caching in a simple, plug-in NAS appliance. According to Bauer, "now we keep all the video files on our StorNext appliance where they can be accessed directly over the network using the same file system interface that everybody already understands. When files will be used often, we stage them to the video server. Otherwise, they reside on StorNext, which fits neatly in our rack system in only 6 rack units. It's a great system. The big files are off active disk, we don't keep backing them up, they're logically organized in Windows directories, we no longer dig through piles of CDs, and yet we have access to any of the files in about a minute. And StorNext is easy to use and gives us plenty of room to grow." In addition to video, the StorNext capacity is being used for other large static files that are accessed infrequently. "It holds PowerPoint presentations and the image files we use with Norton's Ghost software to configure our nearly 900 computers. Image-based configuration lets us set up new systems in just a few minutes-handy when you're putting together 500 identical laptops or getting back to ground zero after somebody has messed up the settings. But we needed space for 25 or so separate, multi-gigabyte image files that we don't use very often. It's a perfect application for the StorNext appliance-the files are always accessible but they don't clog up active disk." At the same time The Hill School moved its static data to StorNext, it also upgraded its backup system, installing an ADIC Scalar 100 tape library with DLT8000 drives. Before, the IS staff backed up nearly 750GB on 20 Dell servers using directly connected DAT drives. "Now, we bring all the data to a central server and it's automatically backed up using Veritas' BackupExec and the Scalar 100. We backup everything once a week, do incrementals every night, and rotate tapes off-site regularly. The data is protected better, and we have time to do the really important things-like teach students and spend time with our families on the weekend." ...ADIC profile |
| |||
This article & logo are reproduced with permission from Steve Whitner, ADIC, September 22, 2000
| STORAGEsearch | storage manufacturers | articles | storage news | Backup software | storage resellers |
| STORAGEsearch is published by ACSL | |||||
