Companies are realizing that data center modernization is the way of the future. Ventura County Community College District (VCCCD) is no different as schools and colleges around the world are embracing new data center technologies, like hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), alongside traditional enterprises.
VCCCD is a public education provider that offers a wide range of educational services to more than 31,000 students. With the help of the vSAN team, VCCCD experienced a seamless transition into virtualized storage, resulting in significant cost and resource savings along the way!
VCCCD is made up of three separate community colleges – Moorpark College, Oxnard College, and Ventura College, with VCCCD providing IT services to four data centers. Technology has helped empower the students through essential learning resources, as well as making sure the colleges run efficiently. Due to the importance of the technical environment, VCCCD decided it was imperative they modernize their data center and address availability, performance, and scalability concerns.
The Business Problem
VCCCD had seen success with adapting vSphere to virtualize its servers, allowing growth while keeping costs minimal. However, as the college district grew, VCCCD quickly identified their legacy Fibre Channel SAN as a bottleneck. “We wanted to get away from single points of failure on the storage side and modernize our data centers, much the same way as we did using vSphere on the server side” says Dean Adams, System Administrator for the district.
Their legacy SAN also left them dependent on a third party vendor to fix any problems that occurred within the system. This dependency slowed down response times greatly and began to interfere with student learning, a core competency that is extremely important to VCCCD.
Resources were tight at VCCCD, given a lean IT staff and fixed budget, which posed issues when it came to scale IT resources to meeting growing demands. If one of the SAN’s filled up, the district was forced into a large capital expenditure as well as higher operational costs to maintain the increased required capacity.
vSAN was the Solution!
vSAN was the optimal product for VCCCD due to its high performance and management simplicity thanks to its native integration with VMware vSphere. vSAN’s price was another qualifying factor, “The way VMware structures the licensing for vSAN made it very affordable compared to other competing products” says Aaron Kay, IT Support Specialist III for the district. With vSAN, VCCCD is no longer paying on a per-GB basis, meaning that as they scale-up their servers (add more drives) or switch to larger capacity drives over time, their storage costs will actually shrink since no additional vSAN licenses are required.
VCCCD decided to deploy four hybrid vSAN storage clusters utilizing Dell PowerEdge R730xd, one for each data center, with 200TB of capacity supporting more than 500 virtual machines and instantly saw success. The District was able to virtualize a variety of applications, including:
Microsoft Exchange Server, Desire2Learn learning management system, Tableau, Trend Micro, Helpdesk, Drupal web servers, Aruba AirWave network management … only to name a few.
vSAN also quickly eliminated noisy neighbor issues for the district due to built in quality-of-service controls that limit and monitor the IOPS consumed by specific virtual machines.
“We saw a noticeable improvement in performance as we moved our workloads over to vSAN. People were asking us ‘What did you do?’. From database-driven reporting to file servers, most of our virtualized workloads benefit from faster I/O” notes Kay.
vSAN’s distributed RAID, cache mirroring and integration with vSphere’s high availability features greatly helped the university achieve its goal of maximizing learning time by greatly reducing the concern for data center downtime and data loss. Implementing vSAN also helped VCCCD address scalability options for their growing data base, now they can add a host to a cluster (scale-out) or add disks to an existing host (scale-up). Finally, vSAN’s easy manageability has also allowed VCCCD to utilize its IT budget more effectively, with no dependency on third party vendors.
“VMware vSAN made storage management a non-issue for this first time vSphere admin … with vSAN any IT organization can take an employee with no storage-specific skills and give them primary responsibility for Tier 1 storage. It’s that easy” claims Kay.
The impact of vSAN
By providing uninterrupted learning, improved business continuity and reduced risk,
vSAN has been a key driver in VCCCD achieving its business goals. vSAN has allowed students to access business applications faster and more efficiently, increasing the time spent on learning. Scalability is no longer a concern of the district, and vSAN’s simple management platform allows IT staff to run vSAN with ease. vSAN reduced VCCCD’s TCO by 50%, allowing the district to reach more students and provide the highest quality of education.
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