Limerick chooses Coraid

Coraid® Inc has been selected by the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT) to improve its capability to handle data growth.

One of 13 members of the Institutes of Technology Ireland (IOTI), LIT has over 6,000 full-time students attending art and design, engineering and IT, business and humanities courses across its seven locations. To support these seven sites LIT relies on approximately 80 physical and 70 virtualised servers and a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN).

In 2010, as LIT’s data storage requirements started to exceed 160TB, with anticipated growth at 15% a year, LIT’s IT team decided to identify a scalable storage platform that could handle the forecasted increases in data volume. The Institute wanted a flexible, high-performance and cost-efficient solution that could support the various applications used by different departments, some more I/O intensive than others.
As LIT planned to develop a private cloud, the IT team reviewed options offering enhanced integration between the underlying storage layer, its increasingly virtualised server estate and its future cloud-based environment.

Joe O'Gorman, Technical Officer at the Limerick Institute of Technology, explained, “As early IT adopters and a public sector organisation we wanted to get the most functionality and highest performance at the best price. After evaluating our options we came to the conclusion that Coraid was a clear winner offering flexibility and ease of management at around 50% less than the cost of extending our existing SAN. Not only this but Coraid’s Ethernet storage allows us to easily mix and match SATA, SAS and SSD drives which fitted in with our plans to develop our own cloud.”

LIT initially installed a 13 Terabyte Coraid solution consisting of an SRX3200 array using 600GB SAS disks. After proving its reliability and flexibility as well as cost-effectiveness, LIT’s IT team scaled the system up with SRX2800 arrays, deploying over 106TB of storage on Coraid but at the same time plugging directly into LIT’s Microsoft applications including Exchange and SQL.

O'Gorman added, “The system has easily met all our criteria in terms of reliability and performance. The platform runs in a high-availability configuration which has offered 100% reliability for the last 24 months. Our decision to become an early adopter of Ethernet SAN has paid off in every way.”

The Coraid EtherDrive SRX series provides the foundation for the EtherDrive storage range by providing low-latency, high-bandwidth data transfer between hosts and data on the network. Each SRX runs the CorOS distributed storage OS to pool individual building blocks together into a single platform.

Pete Godden, VP of EMEA at Coraid said “Coraid’s storage arrays are designed to be easy to operate and meet the high performance and scalability needed by organisations such as LIT that require their data storage systems to be up and running 24/7. Also, as more and more organisations including LIT virtualise their environments our scale-out Ethernet SAN architecture is ideally suited to take them through this process. We’re a dynamic company committed to bringing to the table new and disruptive technologies that will help our customers best develop their storage strategies for the future.”