Educational institutions are renowned for managing demanding IT environments on small budgets. Successfully meeting this challenge is New Zealand’s largest independent school Saint Kentigern College. The lesson, says Saint Kentigern’s director of ICT Walter Chieng, is investing in core technology infrastructure that looks after itself.

When New Zealand IT and consulting company and NetApp storage solutions provider Fujitsu came knocking, Chieng knew the combination of technology and support was just right for his small team and tough performance standards.

More protection, less administration
Chieng and his team of five staff manage an IT environment that in the corporate world would most likely justify an IT department of more than twice the size. Saint Kentigern’s 2,000-plus students are spread over two campuses and follow a strongly ICT integrated curriculum, which sees every student at the college campus armed with a laptop.

With quite literally everything hinging on IT, Chieng is always on the lookout for smarter technology that frees up his team to concentrate on higher value projects rather than mandatory systems caretaking.

So when the time came to consolidate the college’s enterprise servers and attached storage, his first wish was to introduce a single storage device, without impairing the performance of core business applications.

Specifically, a single iSCSI storage appliance had to introduce new levels of information availability and enterprise-class redundancy and protection that the incumbent system lacked.

It also had to be a known performer for a blade server deployment replacing multiple desktops and rack servers hosting the college’s Windows, Exchange and SQL Server databases.

Says Chieng: “The education sector is perhaps better known than private sector companies for tight budgets. However, we require the same performance as the banks and airlines of this world. We have critical business applications and students logging on at all times of the day and night. If IT stops working I certainly get to hear about it.”

SAN solution
Knowing that a single storage appliance was the only practical choice to support an IBM blade server consolidation, the decision came down to budget and the ease of data protection and recovery. In choosing the NetApp FAS250 IP SAN solution Saint Kentigern had its eye on a number of inbuilt functions and industry standard protocols it knew would make life easier and the storage footprint smaller.

“I talked to my industry peers who were working in banks and other mission critical environments and found that they had successfully used NetApp systems,” says Chieng. “It gave me the confidence that the solution would work well in our demanding environment.”

NetApp’s Data ONTAP microkernel operating system provides the building blocks. SnapManager for SQL Server manages full backups and restores in just seconds, without the need to bring SQL Server offline or impairing systems performance; and Snapshot technology means the college is able to store multiple copies of its data – over 250 copies, in fact – for much more granular restores based on specific points in time.

Finally, SnapDrive for Windows simplifies storage provisioning with a wizard-based approach that maps, manages and migrates data between new and existing NetApp storage resources, eliminating the need to preallocate large amounts of storage resources based only on forecasted demand.

Enterprise class
Currently, at less than one terabyte, the college’s storage capacity requirements are by enterprise standards modest. However, this in no way blunted Chieng and his team’s expectations of enterprise class protection, continuity and administrative efficiencies. From the outset the deployment was simple and required little intervention.

Deployed, configured and operational within just four hours, implementing the NetApp FAS250 IP SAN was a low cost, non-disruptive exercise. As data volumes grow and application demands change, NetApp’s flexible architecture balances changing requirements and migrates data across different LUNs (logical unit numbers), with little or no administrative intervention, saving time and cutting costs.

“We don’t have the bandwidth so hardware and software that is self-sustaining is absolutely key for us,” says Chieng.

However, the major achievement has seen the successful introduction of enterprise class protection and continuity. NetApp’s RAID 4 configuration delivers the necessary level of protection against disk failure and, in the unlikely event of a wider systems failure, NetApp Snapshot technology instantly recovers production volume snapshots, without any systems overhead.

Effectively, the setup has removed any single point of failure from the college’s storage infrastructure and introduced administrative efficiencies by slashing iterative backup and restore activities once spread over five database management systems.

Importantly, the storage consolidation hasn’t slowed application performance. Where normally a single storage device doesn’t support the same application access speed as multiple devices, Saint Kentigern’s experience was the polar opposite, with users – in some cases as many as 200 accessing a single application at any one time – noticing improved application responsiveness.

But Chieng says all these achievements would have rung rather hollow had they failed to deliver significant cost savings. “ICT expenditure is always a key management consideration; but the significant cost reduction and flat cost line we’ve achieved has been huge,” says Chieng.

“One of the great things about Fujitsu is that they know their stuff, which is extremely valuable to me – because customers need to be educated. A good measure of return is the extra number of projects we now run, which we couldn’t manage if these things weren’t happening in the background. We’ve moved from maintenance and are now more involved in projects and management rather than pure systems administration. We couldn’t have achieved this without the technology and Fujitsu expertise.”

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