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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

Technology Category
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
  • Education
Applicable Functions
  • Business Operation
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The 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 The 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.
The 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.
Operational Impact
  • Improved backup and disaster recovery capabilities
  • Reduced data center footprint and associated energy savings
  • Inline data deduplication, compression, and optimization
Quantitative Benefit
  • 75 percent reduction in software licensing costs
  • Reduced the amount of hardware in the data center by a factor of over 6X

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