There has been a growing demand for storage servers and space resources in universities across the United States- a problem which has imposed both financial and administrative restrictions. In an effort to avoid any major expense, the Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) decided to build its IT on NetApp’s efficient IT and virtualization solutions. This move has caused CCSU to evade buying more disk while scaling to exploding demands.

“Storage is the foundation of the IT infrastructure that runs all our school’s business and user applications,” said David Orschel, director of Technical Services at CCSU. “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.”

Storage needs are bloating, along with the growing consciousness of what IT can offer. Allocating and reallocating storage without seeking help from professional IT solutions provider amidst the same constricted budget and increases in demand will only mean a waste of time. CCSU’s EMC system had only 1TB of available storage and supported only Fibre Chanel Connectivity. This caused the university to contact ePlus, Inc. a NetApp Star level partner in the NetApp Partner Program and a leading systems integrator in New England, to help upgrade its infrastructure while preventing major cash outflow.

CCSU now virtualizes on VMWare and NetApp storage, and runs 180 virtual servers. With NetApp’s deduplication technology, VMware storage requirements margin are pushed down by 90%. The university’s physical servers also went down from 125 to 20, saving 10% of cooling power while increasing the number of applications it can host. Moreover, 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. Two full-time employees is all it takes to manage the storage for a diverse set of applications of services, and a user base of over 16,000.

“Universities all over the country are using our deduplication and storage efficiency features to dramatically reduce the amount of storage they need to buy and manage, said Mark Weber, president and general manager of U.S. Public Sector at NetApp. “This allows universities more time and resources to help serve students and faculty.”