Barren County Schools Deploys DataCore Storage Virtualization: DataCore, Xiotech and VMware Combine

See the complete Barren County Schools case study here: http://www.datacore.com/BarrenCounty

Barren County Schools in Kentucky, has deployed its SANmelody storage virtualization solution to serve as the cornerstone of its entire virtual infrastructure. DataCore SANmelody works in tandem with Xiotech and VMware vSphere 4 in this total enterprise virtualization deployment. Currently, the virtual storage powered by DataCore serves a user community of 5,500 users – comprising 4,800 students and 700 faculty members.

“The biggest benefit for us was realizing a virtualized data infrastructure,” stated Steve Gumm, IT director, Barren County Schools. “Because we adopted storage virtualization, we now have a front-end piece whereby we can deploy any hardware behind it that we want. We can bring in an additional SAN if we want – whatever vendor we choose – and still use the DataCore product. We can just fold those SANs into our infrastructure and it would be seamless to the end user. Beyond this – with DataCore we were able to repurpose old equipment.”

The IT infrastructure that supports Barren County Schools went from 30 physical servers to four (4) physical servers running 30 VMs. Two DataCore SANmelody SANs each now run on DELL 2850 servers that became available from being decommissioned during the drive to virtualize. The data pool SANmelody is responsible for managing and keeping highly available is currently 16 TBs.

The team chose VMware vSphere on the virtual server-side. “We chose VMware because it was the only solution we saw that offered clustering,” noted Gumm. To support the virtual machines (VMs), the IT team looked at various SAN solutions on the market to be deployed as a backbone for its virtual infrastructure, supporting the VMware server virtualization software. According to Gumm, “We had looked into a couple of different SAN solutions. We already had an EMC SAN. But we also looked at the DELL EqualLogic solution – and did not like some of the features that were brought to the table, particularly in terms of failover.”

“What was particularly relevant to Barren County Schools was exactly what makes DataCore storage virtualization a ‘pure’ virtualization solution – and that is portability,” explained Craig Stein, systems architect, The Mirazon Group. “What I mean by that is that with SANmelody, users can deploy it as a front-end to any back-end hardware SAN that they choose – thereby virtualizing the data storage.

It was this flexibility that was most appealing to the IT team at Barren County Schools. Of equal importance was the fact that with DataCore, the customer owns the software. It does not get thrown out with the next generation of the hardware it is tied to – like some solutions. On the contrary, users can swap out newer hardware whenever they want. When decision time came, it was clear to Barren County’s IT team that this flexibility/portability characteristic gave them a vital piece of the virtualization puzzle.

In the end, DataCore SANmelody was paired with Xiotech hardware because it did bring “so much to the table,” according to Gumm. Among the features he highlights as “hard to pass up” are the ability to thin-provision clients, the ability to migrate data seamlessly to users, and the ability to do upgrades to the school system’s SAN infrastructure (the data structure) without truly having to do a forklift upgrade.

Complete Virtualization Environment Based on DataCore, Xiotech and VMware vSphere 4
“For all intents and purposes, we are 100% virtual,” commented Gumm. Barren County Schools has two data centers – one primary and one secondary. VMware vSphere is currently running on two, new PowerEdge servers. The Xiotech storage arrays are in both data center locations – the primary one and the “offsite,” or secondary, data center. The two locations contain a similar, mirrored, environment which includes two DELL vSphere servers and a Xiotech array which are attached to the SANmelody SAN server. To get to this, Barren County Schools migrated everything it had on an existing EMC SAN to the DataCore and Xiotech based SAN in a live environment using SANmelody to do so. The IT team mapped LUNs from the old SAN to the new SAN and while in production migrated all of the data to the new location.

“This is not one of those products where we were sold more than we bought,” concluded Gumm. “With DataCore SANmelody, we bought more than we were sold. We are getting far more out of it than I thought we would, which is a wonderful thing.”