Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Case Studies Fourth largest school district in the country leverages SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform to cut costs

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	Fourth largest school district in the country leverages SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform to cut costs Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Fourth largest school district in the country leverages SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform to cut costs

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries	Education
Applicable Functions	Business Operation
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Challenge	Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) was facing a 25 to 35 percent annual storage growth rate, which required constant management of its 50TB iSCSI SAN through costly annual expansion. The school district had approximately 100 VMs managing a myriad of heavyweight, mission-critical applications such as collaboration software, Web servers, multiple SQL databases, and a massive, 3,000-user Microsoft Exchange Server. Each year, Rich Dear, Systems Manager at SVUSD, had to expand the school district’s iSCSI SAN to accommodate application performance and user data growth. In addition, SVUSD’s server infrastructure was in need of an upgrade. The IT team was also looking to reduce its data center footprint along with the associated energy costs and management overhead. Read More
About Customer	Located in South Orange County, CA, Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) is the county’s fourth largest school district and includes 26 elementary schools, four intermediate schools, and four high schools. SVUSD provides a highly regarded educational program to approximately 31,000 students from its attendance area that encompasses over 95 square miles. With 33,000 combined staff and students relying on the SVUSD IT infrastructure, storage was always in demand. The SVUSD data center consisted of 20 Dell Blade Servers and two iSCSI storage systems that together consumed 38U of rack space. While the servers and storage allowed the team to run a 95 percent virtualized environment, they were incredibly costly to maintain. Read More
Solution	Initially, when searching for a solution, Dear and his team considered new storage offerings from HP 3Par and Dell EqualLogic; however, after attending a SimpliVity seminar, they quickly shifted their focus to the hyperconverged, Data Virtualization Platform, OmniCube. After determining that SimpliVity’s Data Virtualized Platform would meet and exceed the school district’s needs at a much lower cost than the alternative products, the IT team decided to implement the solution in its data center. Initially, the team started with a two-OmniCube federation in its data center; however, after working with the hyperconverged infrastructure for a few months, Dear decided to implement a third node. From there, the SVUSD IT team decided to implement 10GbE connections between OmniCubes to further streamline the data center. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Education

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Challenge

Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) was facing a 25 to 35 percent annual storage growth rate, which required constant management of its 50TB iSCSI SAN through costly annual expansion. The school district had approximately 100 VMs managing a myriad of heavyweight, mission-critical applications such as collaboration software, Web servers, multiple SQL databases, and a massive, 3,000-user Microsoft Exchange Server. Each year, Rich Dear, Systems Manager at SVUSD, had to expand the school district’s iSCSI SAN to accommodate application performance and user data growth. In addition, SVUSD’s server infrastructure was in need of an upgrade. The IT team was also looking to reduce its data center footprint along with the associated energy costs and management overhead.

About Customer

Located in South Orange County, CA, Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) is the county’s fourth largest school district and includes 26 elementary schools, four intermediate schools, and four high schools. SVUSD provides a highly regarded educational program to approximately 31,000 students from its attendance area that encompasses over 95 square miles. With 33,000 combined staff and students relying on the SVUSD IT infrastructure, storage was always in demand. The SVUSD data center consisted of 20 Dell Blade Servers and two iSCSI storage systems that together consumed 38U of rack space. While the servers and storage allowed the team to run a 95 percent virtualized environment, they were incredibly costly to maintain.

Solution

Initially, when searching for a solution, Dear and his team considered new storage offerings from HP 3Par and Dell EqualLogic; however, after attending a SimpliVity seminar, they quickly shifted their focus to the hyperconverged, Data Virtualization Platform, OmniCube. After determining that SimpliVity’s Data Virtualized Platform would meet and exceed the school district’s needs at a much lower cost than the alternative products, the IT team decided to implement the solution in its data center. Initially, the team started with a two-OmniCube federation in its data center; however, after working with the hyperconverged infrastructure for a few months, Dear decided to implement a third node. From there, the SVUSD IT team decided to implement 10GbE connections between OmniCubes to further streamline the data center.

Impact #1	Improved backup and disaster recovery capabilities
Impact #2	Reduced data center footprint and associated energy savings
Impact #3	Inline data deduplication, compression, and optimization

Impact #1

Improved backup and disaster recovery capabilities

Impact #2

Reduced data center footprint and associated energy savings

Impact #3

Inline data deduplication, compression, and optimization

Benefit #1	75 percent reduction in software licensing costs
Benefit #2	Reduced the amount of hardware in the data center by a factor of over 6X

Benefit #1

75 percent reduction in software licensing costs

Benefit #2

Reduced the amount of hardware in the data center by a factor of over 6X

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Overview

Fourth largest school district in the country leverages SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform to cut costs

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit