EMC’s VNX unified storage and DataDomain deduplication technology are being used by The Toronto District School Board, the fourth largest district in North America,  to achieve greater operational efficiency.

TDSB supports 6,000 schools that are compromised by 250,000 students and 40,000 staff. Consultants from EMC’s Global Services business provided the “skills support and knowledge transfer” to virtualize the board’s poorly managed 325-terabyte storage infrastructure with Hyper-V and migrate from SAS to Flash 1 strategy. The latter is a relatively new enhancement to the VNX FAST software suite, which, as of the update, pushes efficiency up a notch by enabling users to mix RAID types within a storage pool.

EMC says that the TDBS has seen a 32 percent reduction in capacity requirements and a 22 percent reduction in energy usage thanks to the combination of FAST and Microsoft’s hypervisor.  The board expects flash tier costs to decrease by 39 percent, and Microsoft apps now run 21 percent faster in the upgraded environment.

Lastly, the Toronto District School Board is using DataDomain to keep its data safe. From the release:

“TDSB replaced its tape backup environment with EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems, resulting in reduced backup times and a decrease in backup storage requirements by over 90%.”

In addition to supplying the hardware EMC also put it all together on-site, and services are indeed starting to play a much bigger role in the company’s strategic outlook. Earlier this week it unveiled new incentives for its biggest distributors in order to boost the reseller’s stake one step down the supply chain. The storage vendor is providing training, tools and use studies to speed up assembly and get deployments up and running much faster for the customer.