Palmer’s College STORAGE EXPERIENCE

About us Medium sized 6 th Form Full time students- 180 staff. Single site- Apart from separate Sports center Devices connected. Common Storage Issues – We need more space!

Existing Kit and our Dilemma Approximately 20 physical Servers- IBM with some virtualisation backend servers - conservative with data Always wanted what was deemed one of the best — fired for buying IBM? Our IBM DS range Fibre channel SAN- not enough storage for Virtualisation. Loved virtualisation - Visit to Havering College & showed datacentre with ‘live vmotion’. Core HP Switch kit also needing an update Dilemma on how we were going to afford kit fast enough for large scale virtualisation plus a large increase of storage?

Decisions-Decisions.. Contacts made with Technical IT companies on what they thought would be the best solution. Mostly the Big players i.e. EMC, IBM, HP, Dell but also spoke regarding Hitachi. Started getting in prices but mostly iscsi…Ouch!—Would iscsi cope? FC overly complex and out of price range? Colchester 6 th Form – Chris mentioned his issues with their current SAN infrastructure and how it would cost £££’s to improve – more disks - hated the vendor lock in. Support costs. First mention of CORAID at an RSC Tech Managers Meeting.

Coraid and my worries! We immediately started to take a look at Coraid in some detail –Visit to Colchester as they had an SR unit setup in their Lab- visited IPEXPO Tech guys thought it was great – Very fast lots of IO – Very simple to set up, instruction ‘book’ just 12 pages.- list of commands- no GUI- Mix & match disks in same unit. Protocol –AoE – ATA over Ethernet (not FC not iscsi)ATA over Ethernet Found a 2 nd hand SR series and tried in our lab. Where was I going to get finance from ?- SALIX Green Computing. Never heard of Coraid-Too small? No UK base at the time- not on Vmware official list!!!– Spoke to 3 rd party IT company who was positive about them. Spoke directly with Coraid in US.

Purchase & Installation Purchased two SRX3200, 2 xVRX (mirroring) + foc SRX2800 – IBM Host servers x Gig HBA’s.All installed within a day- 2 nd day PtoV conversion. Budget allowed for 10Gb Switch gear at core to handle Vmware infrastructure. 2 nd SRX unit used in secondary data centre in Sports centre for DR & maintenance…eventually dropped DR contract. Utilized ‘Free’ SRX 2800 to run a small Vmware View deployment of 80 Win 7 Desktops- 4 SSD’s.

Our Experience Two days before Staff & students arrived back decided to install Vsphere 4.1 One day before… Oh $£^!! Calls to Vmware (no issues with Coraid support), IBM and Coraid (afternoon) Hotfix spotted by us – and the culprit was ??????????? – never get.. Has run flawlessly since 1 st day of full production. Kept it Simple with Coraid.

Summary “We initially looked at Coraid because of the low TCO but we were then blown away by the performance and the simplicity” – Nick Dixon, Tech sales director, Axis first US – We saved ££££’s on deploying Coraid in comparison to traditional vendor. Do not just look at the big players- lots of smaller start ups out there. Coraid have newer faster arrays since our install. Storage vendors that have come to my attention since our Coraid Install :