Coraid delivers highly scalable Ethernet Storage

Customer Overview
Since it was founded in 1975, the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT) has grown in both reputation and size. As one of 13 Institutes that are members of the Institutes of Technology Ireland (IOTI), LIT has more than 6,000 full-time students attending the Institute’s seven sites offering schools within Art and Design, Engineering and IT, Business and Humanities. The main concentration of technology is located in the Computer Centre on the Moylish Park campus and the majority of classes in the first two years take place here. Specialist computing labs are also provided for Degree students on most courses.

Business Challenge
LIT runs about 80 physical servers and 70 virtualised servers to support the delivery of a broad range of software applications across seven sites. To provide the bulk of its storage capacity, the Institute has for the last few years run a Fibre Channel based Storage Area Network (SAN). Although its existing SAN had proven adequate for the Institute’s needs, as its total data storage requirements start to exceed 160TB and projections showed volumes growing at up to 15% a year; LIT clearly needed a scalable storage platform for the future.

In common with similar academic centres, LIT refreshes its core information technology platforms approximately every five years. As part of an upcoming refresh in 2011, senior IT managers began evaluating its longer term data storage requirements. The initial plan was to expand its existing SAN platform. However, after deeper examination it was felt that limitations in flexibility and performance as well as the high cost of upgrading its Fibre Channel estate made the option less than optimal. In addition to capacity constraints, the diversity of applications used by different parts of the Institute, such as intensive users within its engineering department, prompted calls for a high-performance and more flexible storage platform.
As Joe O’Gorman, Technical Officer at Limerick Institute of Technology explains, “We have tended to be early IT adopters but we always take into account our longer-term strategic directions.” It was the Institute’s plan to deploy a portion of its IT as an internal cloud that also dissuaded it from an upgrade to its SAN. Instead, the IT staff started looking at options offering enhanced integration between the underlying storage layer and its increasingly virtualised server estate and future cloud computing environment.

Solution
LIT began assessing a number of possible solutions and sought expressions of interest from suppliers. As O’Gorman explains, flexibility, price and ease-of-management were three key criteria; “At least on paper, Coraid was a clear winner,” highlighting its ability to easily scale-out using commodity hardware. “The roadmap from Coraid also indicated that we would also be able to easily mix and match SATA, SAS and SSD drives which would be a useful feature as we started developing our own cloud.”

However, it was price where O’Gorman highlights the most striking difference between expanding its existing Fibre Channel SAN and moving to a Coraid Ethernet solution. “We estimated that it cost between 50% to 60% less to deploy a complete Coraid solution rather that extending our existing SAN,” says the Technical Officer, “and the switch to Ethernet also gave us a lot more flexibility around the deployment, and made the creation of a high-availability position much easier.”

In January of 2011, LIT initially deployed a 13 Terabyte Coraid solution consisting of an SRX3200 unit using 600GB SAS disks.

Benefits
As the first Coraid deployment within an academic establishment in Ireland, O’Gorman admits that there was some concern that maybe they were too early. “We had looked at a few case studies and the technical specification but it was only once we had the Coraid platform installed that we were really able to compare it to our SAN.” In tests, O’Gorman confirmed that the Coraid Ethernet SAN was equal to the performance of its Fibre Channel SAN. In a financial comparison, the Coraid solution offered a 60% cost reduction over a comparable upgrade to its existing Fibre Channel SAN, with a lot more flexibility.

From a management prospective, the Coraid solution has also “proven incredibly easy to use and configure,” explains Michael Tuohy, Senior Technical Officer, “and as we start to move to a private cloud, Coraid gives us an incredibly flexible storage pool that allows us to extend our investment in stages as our needs change.” Today, LIT has more than 106TB of storage on Coraid. The platform runs in a high-availability configuration which has offered 100% reliability for the last 24 months.

O’Gorman and the management team have declared the Coraid platform a success both in terms of value and with alignment to its wider strategic direction. “The system has easily met our expectations both in terms of reliability and performance and our decision to become an early adopter has been vindicated,” he adds.