From Quicksand to Compellent Reliability

Maine Maritime Academy (MMA) is one of six maritime colleges in the United States. MMA’s location in Castine, ME, is ideal for their students’ rigorous maritime education, although being on a peninsula on the coast of Maine can have its drawbacks.
Especially if your IT system goes down.

Challenge

Before Winslow Technology Group got involved, the MMA server infrastructure was all direct attached storage (DAS), with each server having its own dedicated storage. This decentralized system was somewhat tenuous, and personnel spent a significant amount of time putting out fires and creating contingency plans instead of building the network and expanding services for students. An audit revealed an almost total lack of backup and restore capability. If a server went down, it could be days before applications were up again, sometimes leaving students and faculty without email or course management software. “Until you have reliable storage, you’re building on quicksand,” said Lisa Roy, CTO at MMA.

solution

Roy proposed that MMA create a centralized, reliable storage architecture. After a rigorous competitive bidding and review process, Roy told her colleagues, “We simply can’t live without the Compellent SAN proposed by Winslow Technology Group. It meets our specifications with features like automated migration of our inactive data, space efficient replays for quick recovery, and the ability to “boot from SAN”. The proven functionality and reliability of a SAN, combined with WTG’s responsiveness and technical expertise, also won her colleagues over. “WTG is the best vendor I ever worked with,” said Roy. “They bring in a team with technical know-how, and actually see you through a problem. When WTG says, ‘This is the right solution’ you can trust that.”

The WTG team installed a Compellent SAN which serves as a centralized storage solution for all twenty-five MMA servers. The current architecture, featuring the SAN as the foundation, is comprised of a Fibre Channel switch, dual Compellent controllers, thirty-two FC and sixteen SATA drives. The SAN includes more than twenty-one TB of storage capacity. MMA augments this architecture with a second SAN utilized as part of their disaster recovery plan that includes eleven SAS drives and eight TB of storage. MMA moved from quicksand to a reliable foundation, and they haven’t looked back.

results

Norm Yates, Network Manager at MMA, uses this analogy to describe their results. “Imagine that at your house, all of a sudden you had a maid, a nanny, a handyman, and a chauffeur. How would that change your life? With the SAN in place, we now have time to work on other projects and strategic planning.”

“Compellent replay technology makes software updates worry free” says Roy. “And, if a server does go down, we can mount a replay and put it back up on a different machine, minimizing time that students and faculty are without applications.” It has changed day-to-day operations tremendously, giving the IT department the time to work on MMA’s seven simulators, expand the wireless network on campus, and provide the students and faculty with reliable applications.