Texas College Relies on IP SAN to Provide Roaming Profile Access to Students across Campus Network
Intransa IP Storage Solution Enables Access for 60,000 Profiles
SAN JOSE, California — July 26, 2006
Intransa, the global innovator of network-centric, IP storage solutions, today announced that San Jacinto College has implemented Intransa's IP storage solution to support its roaming profile system. The system enables the college to provide students with access to personal file storage and user profile settings on any workstation on the campus network. The Houston-area College previously deployed a NAS solution that could not handle the workload associated with supporting 60,000 user profiles on the system. Instead of deploying costly Fibre Channel SAN upgrades, the school looked to Intransa to provide a powerful, but cost-effective storage solution that leveraged existing IP infrastructure and could meet their strict performance requirements.
San Jacinto College students can now log on to the campus network and access their personal file storage as well as Internet shortcuts, making their system appear the same on any machine on the college's three metropolitan campuses. Student application settings for a wide variety of academic applications such as AutoCAD and other engineering software, reading and math software, and video production applications are then copied to the local machine they have logged into. Students can continue to work on projects in progress over time, even if they were started on another workstation in a different building or campus.
“First we wanted to see if IP [storage] could perform per our requirements, and second, we needed it to be easy to manage and cost effective,” said Will Sydnor, systems administrator, San Jacinto College. “We looked a number of iSCSI and SCSI solutions including NetApp and EMC, but no one was able to come close to Intransa.”
San Jacinto College deployed an Intransa IP5500 storage controller with three disk enclosures providing the school with 12 TBs of capacity. Sydnor was able to migrate all 60,000 user profiles to Intransa and reconfigure the servers and applications in less than one afternoon. He also set up a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup system that shortened the backup cycle and allowed for much faster restores.
“San Jacinto College now has the largest roaming profile system of any academic institution in Texas, thanks to the performance and availability that the Intransa storage solution provides,” said Doug Rainbolt, vice-president of marketing, Intransa. “This is a great competitive differentiator that the school can point to when attracting prospective students.”
In the future, San Jacinto College plans to roll more of its systems off its inflexible Fibre-Channel SAN to the Intransa solution, including email and a remote disaster recovery system. The Intransa IP5000 has built-in replication functionality that will allow Sydnor to mirror data to a remote site in Austin, Texas. If a system goes down, or the entire data center is wiped out, the college will be able to failover to the remote site without any disruption to services.
“The built-in capabilities of the Intransa solution provide much greater cost savings than we ever imagined,” said Sydnor. “Taking all the ROI factors into account, and the fact that we don't need additional networking equipment or management software, we've already saved nearly six times the original cost of the solution”.
About Intransa
Intransa, Inc. is the leading innovator of shared, scalable and simple external IP storage solutions for video and IT storage. Based in San Jose, CA, Intransa offers scalable, high performance security-grade storage with outstanding availability and price/performance, with built in Set-and-Forget Management for proven ease of use.
Beginning as a 3Com spin-off, Intransa has been shipping shared IP network storage solutions since 2003. Intransa IP storage is available worldwide through authorized StorPartner security and systems integrators. Intransa is an Axis Communications Applications Development Partner, Cisco Ecosystem Provider, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and VMware Technology Alliance Partner along with many other industry partnerships through our StorAlliance Technology Partner program.
For more information about Intransa and our industry-leading sharable, scalable and simple external IP storage solutions, to locate a StorPartner security and systems integrator, or to join the StorAlliance Technology Partner program, please visit us at www.intransa.com.
Intransa, EdgeBlock, BuildingBlock, PerformanceBlock, Security-Grade IP Video Storage, DynaStac, StorStac OS, StorManager, StorStac Snapshot, StorAR, StorCluster, the 3Rs for Video, the 3Ss of IP Storage, Set-and-Forget Management, StorSupport, StorWarranty, StorAlliance and StorPartner are registered names and trademarks of Intransa, Inc. All others are the property of their respective holders.
Media contact:
Kathleen Bermea-Sullivan
Ignite Public Relations & Investor Relations Consulting
Phone: +1 (303) 439-9365
www.igniteconsultinginc.com
E-mail: kathleen@igniteconsultinginc.com