Sydney school gets serious about storage

01.09.2006
In a sign that storage area networks (SANs) are extending their reach in to mid-tier enterprises, a Sydney high school has deployed 10TB of capacity for its data management and disaster recovery requirements.

This is serious storage for a high school and is evidence of the more complex deployments taking place in the education sector.

With some 1500 students and 250 staff, Saint Ignatius' College Riverview is one of Sydney's larger schools and is not holding back when it comes to investing in IT.

The school's head of IT, Christopher O'Mahony said education and business needs drive the selection of specific solutions. In the case of its storage infrastructure there wasn't enough "give" in the old system, he said, because everything was either full or approaching full.

"Rather than patch, patch, patch, we knew the time had come to look at a major rebuild," O'Mahony said.

The school contracted Acer to design a SAN solution using storage hardware from Hitachi Data Systems Inc. and backup software from CommVault Inc.