Sunnyvale, Calif.-September 27,
2011- While striving to provide academic excellence and
support the educational aspirations of students, colleges and
universities across the country are increasingly confronted with
shrinking budgets, skyrocketing data growth, and challenging IT
environments. In order to achieve their aggressive educational
goals, many schools, like the University of San Diego (USD) and Art
Center College of Design, are transforming their IT infrastructures
to gain greater flexibility and efficiency with storage foundations
that are built
on NetApp.
USD is a rigorous liberal arts school in
Southern California. With 7,800 students and a sizable staff, USD
previously managed IT needs with four data centers on campus,
typically adding storage capacity when necessary. However, with an
increase in high-bandwidth education applications and every-day
administrative tasks, the amount of university data exploded from
5TB to 90TB over the course of just a couple of years. To
effectively manage its growing data needs, USD turned to NetApp to
upgrade and consolidate its entire storage infrastructure, helping
the school improve operational efficiencies and gain the necessary
flexibility to meet its evolving IT needs of the future.
Another California school faced with similar
data challenges is Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Art
Center relies on a heavy computing environment, offering
data-intensive courses in film, photography, graphic design, and
many other art and design programs. Originally reliant on a
decentralized storage infrastructure, Art Center found it difficult
to manage and protect its growing data. Art Center turned to NetApp
to consolidate its storage resources into a single unified
platform, allowing the college to more effectively manage its IT
environment and save more than $135,000 in additional storage
costs.
News Highlights
University of San Diego
- USD, which worked with NetApp reseller RestorWare, built its
Microsoft® applications and VMware® environment on a
NetApp® foundation to increase IT efficiencies, maximize
storage utilization, and reduce power and cooling costs.
- USD is now able to reduce the time required to replicate data
volumes and datasets for development from more than 24 hours down
to just a couple of minutes, freeing up resources to focus on other
strategic projects.
- Improved disaster recovery capabilities enable USD to securely
store copies of staff, faculty, and student data for quick recovery
and allow USD to maintain governance and compliance with industry
regulations.
- USD leverages NetApp storage management software to efficiently
manage all storage and protocols with minimal NetApp training. The
single management framework provides the team with the flexibility
to respond quickly to changing university demands.
Art Center College of
Design
- Art Center, which worked with Colorado-based NetApp reseller
Advanced Systems
Group, leverages NetApp's unique storage
efficiency technologies to dramatically reduce
storage costs and requirements. Thin provisioning allows Art
Center to utilize just 3.5TB of NetApp storage to manage a total
storage allocation of 27.5TB for students and faculty, saving the
college more than $90,000 in storage costs. Deduplication
technology has saved the school an additional $45,000 by reducing
VMware storage requirements by 44%.
- The college used to purge student data at the end of the
academic year to reclaim needed storage space. With NetApp's
ability to quickly and easily reprovision storage combined with the
increased efficiencies, Art Center is now able to provide 5GB of
personal storage to each student for his or her entire time in
school and 20GB to faculty members. The improved flexibility
enables the college to more effectively respond to and manage the
school's hard-to-predict and expanding storage needs.
- Art Center leverages SnapManager® for Exchange and Single
Mailbox Recovery to enhance the college's e-mail availability. As a
result, recovering a mailbox, which used to take as much as 2
hours, now takes just 45 minutes, getting staff and faculty back
online faster for improved productivity.
Supporting Quotes
- Christopher Wessells, vice provost and chief
intelligence officer, University of San Diego:
"USD is committed to providing our students, faculty, and staff
with the best educational resources and learning tools, and our IT
infrastructure is fundamental to making this a reality. Moving to a
NetApp foundation has provided us with incredible efficiencies to
help us reduce costs and get far more out of our storage
infrastructure than we did in the past. Additionally, the improved
flexibility has enabled us to seamlessly manage our exponential
data growth without having to add additional staff, allowing us to
optimize resources and apply more focus to organizational
innovation."
- Jason Blackader, UNIX system administrator, Art Center
College of Design:
"Art Center provides learning programs to students that require
extreme amounts of data that places an incredible strain on our IT
environment. As a result we needed a storage infrastructure that
could support this growing demand and enable us to deliver the most
innovative services to our students. NetApp has given us everything
we need in a single platform, helping us dramatically cut costs and
more effectively support the educational aspirations of our
students."
- Regina Kunkle, vice president of State and Local
Government and Higher Education (SLED), NetApp:
"USD and Art Center are both great examples of how the right
IT infrastructure can further a school's educational objective
by reducing costs and effectively managing the massive increase in
data and information that is created on a daily basis. NetApp has
long partnered with universities and colleges throughout the
country to help them navigate these unique challenges, and we are
committed to continuing to provide the most innovative solutions to
enable them to thrive in the future."
Additional Resources
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions
that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business
breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping companies around
the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.
Press Contact:
Ryan Lowry
NetApp
(408) 822-7544
ryan.lowry@netapp.com
NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further,
faster, and SnapManager are trademarks or registered trademarks of
NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. VMware is
a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. Microsoft is a registered
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of The Open Group. All other brands or products are trademarks or
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treated as such.