- Client: The St. James Parish Public Schools is a school district headquartered in Lutcher, Louisiana. The district serves all of St. James Parish.
- Situation: The current EMC SAN provided only half the storage space that was advertised. Each time IT took a snapshot, the SAN’s storage was over-allocated, causing hardware failures. Many servers could not be virtualized due to the storage shortcomings. There was no proper backup for the data on the SAN.
- Solution: General Informatics installed an active Compellent SAN with 32TB of storage, which cost less than the EMC. GI engineers then migrated all current VMware virtual servers to the new environment without any downtime. All the remaining physical servers were converted to virtual servers using the VMware Converter Tool.
- Benefit: The school system dumped its aging SAN in favor of new tiered technology that was both faster and provided 4x the space for less than the cost of the EMC. St. James can grow the SAN 3Tb – one drive at a time – at $1000 per drive. The EMC was provisioned as a backup device to the Compellent using Compellent’s built in API’s, at a fraction of the cost of commercial software.
