CCSU Modernizes IT Infrastructure with NetApp

Through a recent press release, Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) announced that it has revamped its IT infrastructure by using efficient IT and virtualization solutions from NetApp.

The new infrastructure, according to the university, helped in reducing the authority’s concern for inflating budget for expanding storage and server requirements and focusing more on the aspects of education.

In a media release, David Orschel, director of technical services at CCSU said: “Storage is the foundation of the IT infrastructure that runs all our school's business and user applications. We needed a more efficient and scalable infrastructure, and we just don't have the funding or the staff to risk being locked into a solution that can't respond to our changing needs. Now, we have that flexibility and efficiency. We use less capacity, scale without adding headcount, and provide higher availability and faster response than ever before.”

According to the CCSU officials, the institutions has been facing ballooning storage needs while resources and budget remained constricted. This forced the IT staff to spend much of its time allocating and reallocating what storage it had to address its changing needs. Furthermore, the existing EMC (News - Alert) system had only 1TB of available storage and supported only Fibre Channel connectivity.

Financial budget was restricting the university to respond adequately to the growing server demands. ePlus, Inc., a NetApp Star-level partner in the NetApp Partner Program helped the university to handle the situation by upgrading its infrastructure.

As a result of CCSU’s transition to VMware and NetApp storage, CCSU is now able to run 180 virtual servers. The university also reduced its physical servers from 125 to 20, saving 10 percent in power and cooling costs and increasing the number of applications it can host.

With NetApp's deduplication and thin provisioning, CCSU avoided buying 36TB of storage and increased the total amount of storage allocation by a factor of 100.

The university now employs only two full-time employees to manage storage for a diverse set of applications and services and a user base of over 16,000.

A few months back, NetApp was recognized by the channel industry as Vendor of the Year 2010 at CRN Awards. The company was celebrating for the second consecutive year having been named Storage Vendor of the Year in 2009.