Modernisation page with storage at Victoria College

TEXAS, USA: Victoria College, a community college and continuing education hub in the Crossroads region of South Texas, is turning to Dell to modernize its virtual storage environment and computer resources. To address capacity constraints with its former EMC storage area network (SAN), Victoria College migrated to a more flexible and cost-effective Dell Compellent storage solution that reduces data center costs with a three-fold improvement in storage utilization, as per a press note.

The college has relied on Dell for 15 years for much of its technology infrastructure to provide students and teachers a seamless and dependable learning environment. The Victoria College IT team jumped at the chance to deploy a fully supported Dell Compellent Storage Center with 30 terabytes of raw capacity-up to three times the capacity of its EMC array-for about the cost of the maintenance renewal on its legacy SAN.

To modernize and improve data center efficiency, Victoria College virtualized most of its infrastructure using Dell PowerEdge M610 and M600 blade servers running virtualization software. 

As added ahead, Victoria College's three-fold improvement in storage utilization is a product of Dell Compellent thin provisioning. This apparently enables the institution to make the most of its storage resources without wasting them on pre-allocated and unused storage, compared to its legacy EMC storage array. Thin provisioning allows the college to create storage volumes instantaneously, versus up to two to three minutes with its former solution, also freeing up IT maintenance time.

"With the flexible, modular design of the Dell Compellent SAN, we are able to quickly scale, mix and match the latest drive technologies, and cost-effectively address changing budgetary constraints, which was not possible with our legacy EMC solution," said Daniel Robinson, Victoria College systems administrator.