Albion College Selects Magnitude 3D 4000 Storage Systems with TimeScale GeoRep to Manage Its Critical Data EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., Aug. 11
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., Aug. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Xiotech Corporation today
announced that Albion College chose two Xiotech(R) Magnitude 3D(R) 4000
storage area network (SAN) systems, along with TimeScale(R) GeoRep software.
The new storage systems and software will support the college's move to a
virtualized server environment, while ensuring student, faculty and
administrative files are available and protected from natural and unnatural
events.
Founded in 1835, Albion, Mich.-based Albion College is a private,
four-year, liberal arts college. The school provides educational and research
services to more than 1,900 students and 135 full-time faculty members.
To continue offering its students and faculty members new and improved
technology services, Albion College needed to upgrade its existing IT
infrastructure and stop server sprawl. From 1998 to 2008 the college added 50
physical servers to its data center, bringing the total number of servers to
70. Management of all these servers and their direct-attached storage was
taking a tremendous amount of staff time.
"Instead of spending time planning and researching new technologies for
our students and staff, our IT department found themselves working primarily
on keeping the current IT infrastructure running," said Kurt Ashley, director
of Systems & Networking at Albion College. "To break away from this cycle, we
needed to reduce our server footprint using virtualization, and Xiotech's
Magnitude 3D 4000 systems were key to this transition."
Albion College plans to eliminate more than 75 percent of its servers,
reducing the total number to 15, and will use one of the Magnitude 3D 4000
systems to support half of those. The storage system will initially have 15
terabytes of capacity divided between two storage tiers: 300 gigabyte
Enterprise Fibre Channel drives and 750 gigabyte Serial ATA (SATA) drives. IT
staff at Albion College will be able to move data easily among the tiers to
meet the organization's needs, without any application or system downtime.
To ensure its faculty and student data is protected from natural and
unnatural disasters, Albion College is creating a remote data center, which
will be supported by the second Magnitude 3D 4000 system and another 6
terabytes of SATA disks. The college will replicate data between the main and
remote data centers asynchronous throughout the day using Xiotech's TimeScale
GeoRep software.
"TimeScale GeoRep will allow us to automatically replicate our data across
any distance, migrate storage volumes between data centers with zero downtime,
and automate our data recovery process," said Scott Stephen, chief information
officer at Albion College. "We expect to reduce our server recovery time
objective from 24 hours to less than four hours with the replication
solution."
Albion College will go live with the Magnitude 3D 4000 storage systems
Aug. 20, 2008. Combined, the two systems will have a storage capacity of 21
terabytes.
"As we've expanded our storage line from the Magnitude 3D family to
Emprise(TM) solutions, we've received hundreds of inquires from IT shops
looking to find flexible, reliable storage solutions that will help them meet
their business objectives," said Mike Hoch, vice president of Marketing at
Xiotech. "We find that our customers have a great sense of how they will
develop their storage infrastructures down the road, and are viewing Xiotech
as the company who has the storage and data protection solutions to meet their
needs today and in the future."
About Xiotech
Xiotech Corporation, an innovator in data storage and protection
solutions, is delivering the new foundation of storage with unprecedented
reliability, performance and scalability. Xiotech's Emprise(TM) storage family
is built on patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, which
virtually eliminates drive-related service events, while delivering
industry-leading performance. Both the Emprise and Magnitude(R) families of
storage systems are feature rich, with optimal storage virtualization, Fibre
Channel and iSCSI connectivity, grow-as-you-go scalability, unmatched ease of
use, and integrated customization via Web services. Additionally, Xiotech's
TimeScale(R) line offers comprehensive, modular solutions for data protection
and availability.
Xiotech is based in Eden Prairie, Minn., and maintains major facilities in
Colorado Springs, Colo., and Hyderabad, India. For more information, visit
http://www.xiotech.com, email info@xiotech.com or call toll free
1.866.472.6764.
SOURCE Xiotech Corporation
