COPPIN STATE UNIVERSITY
ALACRITECH CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

Network Accelerators Enhance University’s IP Storage Network, Improving Application Performing while Easing IT Management

• Industry/Market:
  » Higher Education
  
• Challenge:
  » Improve application performance of administrative applications, giving university employees reliable access to student, registration and administrative data
  » Reduce complexity of the storage network, freeing up small IT staff to focus on more proactive projects
  » Improve scalability of storage network, enabling IT infrastructure to grow in step with the needs of the university
  » Reduce costs of storage deployment and management—the school’s existing Fibre Channel SAN cost more than $1 million to maintain over three years
  
• iSCSI Solution:
  » Alacritech iSCSI Scalable Network Accelerators, which replaced standard network interface cards
  
• Key Benefits:
  » Replacing standard network interface cards with Alacritech’s network accelerators dramatically improved application performance of the ERP and SQL applications
  » Enabled migration from 1 Gb Fibre Channel SAN to 2 Gb iSCSI SAN, easing management and improving storage performance
  » University administrators have more reliable and faster access to information and business applications, improving productivity of end users
  » The iSCSI SAN is more cost-efficient—savings from the Alacritech network accelerators is more than $25,000 in capital costs and thousands more in operational costs
  » Storage management is much easier, saving more than 100 man hours per month
  » The storage network is more scalable, growing from 9 TB to 18 TB
  » Equipment migration is much easier through simple deployment of network accelerators, allowing the university to systematically upgrade arrays on a set schedule without affecting application availability or the productivity of end users

Business Profile:
A comprehensive urban, liberal arts institution with a commitment to excellence in teaching, research and continuing service to its community, Coppin State University provides educational access and diverse opportunities for students with a high potential for success and for students whose promise may have been hindered by a lack of social, personal or financial opportunity. High quality academic programs offer innovative curricula and the latest advancements in technology to prepare students for new workforce careers in a global economy.

"We’re extremely happy with the way the Alacritech network accelerators have enhanced the performance of our storage network. They made the move to iSCSI a no brainer, giving us a more efficient, better functioning storage environment that we can trust."
    Thomas R. Smith III, Director of Network Services
    Coppin State University

Business Challenge:
For years, the IT staff at Coppin State University, a state-funded university in Baltimore, Maryland, suffered from having to maintain an archaic, complex and inefficient storage network. The nine-terabit Fibre Channel SAN was spread between two facilities—a data center in the University’s main campus and a secondary site in the School of Nursing—to provide disaster recovery protection. However, according to Thomas R. Smith III, the director of network services at the University, the SAN was very complex to manage and operate, resulting in multiple network storage issues.

The IT complexity started to affect application performance, preventing Coppin State University’s administration staff from accessing student, registration and other administrative information, as needed. As throughput decreased, the productivity of end users— the backbone of the University’s operations—slowed and its 4,000 students weren’t able to receive the quality of service they required when they had questions about university courses, grades, transcripts or registration.

Compounding the management nightmare, the entire IT staff was made up of only three specialists, all of whom inherited the inefficient infrastructure. With limited IT resources, there weren’t enough man-hours to dedicate to maintaining the existing storage network just to meet basic baseline objectives. The network was even harder to scale, preventing the school from expanding storage capacity to support its administrative operations’ requirements.

“While in theory we had two operational data centers, we could only rely on the main facility. We just didn’t have the manpower needed to keep both sites up and running properly,” Smith said. “We had no reliability and suffered from performance issues. We knew that we needed to make some changes.”

The university worked with its storage vendor to re-engineer the infrastructure, attempting to take some of the complexity out of the network. More than $1 million later, the storage network was still too difficult to manage and hadn’t improved the performance as much as the IT staff would have liked.

Enhancing iSCSI
In an effort to reduce network complexity and increase storage performance, Coppin State University, under the guidance of Daly Computers out of Clarksburg, Maryland, scrapped its Fibre Channel network in favor of a 2 Gb iSCSI SAN from LeftHand Networks enhanced by Alacritech Scalable Network Accelerators. The combination of switching from Fibre Channel to IP and replacing standard network interface cards with Alacritech’s network accelerators dramatically improved application performance of the ERP and SQL applications that run the school’s administrative functions.

At first, the upgrade to an iSCSI SAN presented some performance issues that Thomas and his staff traced back to generic network cards. After installing the Alacritech network accelerators, performance dramatically improved.

“We saw major performance and management benefits from migrating to iSCSI,” said Mohammed Ahmed, assistant director of network services, Coppin State University. “The entire storage solution worked seamlessly – exactly like it was supposed to. The difference between our old network and our new one was like night and day.”

“We saw major performance and management benefits from migrating to iSCSI,” said Mohammed Ahmed, assistant director of network services, Coppin State University. “The entire storage solution worked seamlessly – exactly like it was supposed to. The difference between our old network and our new one was like night and day.”

The network accelerators are installed on 30 HP ProLiant servers that power the storage network. They can be installed in minutes (versus hours to install FC network cards and an hour to install competing iSCSI cards), allowing Thomas and the other specialists to quickly deploy additional storage capacity or swap-out existing equipment.

Improving Application Performance while Reducing IT Complexity
As a result of migrating to an iSCSI SAN and taking the TCP processing burden off of the processor, Coppin State University has reduced IT complexity in the storage network and improved application performance for end users, giving the school’s administrative staff reliable access to the tools and information they need to provide course registration, grade reporting, billing and other services to students. At the same time, the IT staff is more efficient and is able to focus on more proactive, preventative projects. The reliable network also gives them the peace of mind that storage performance will never be an inhibitor to the daily operations of the college.

“The greatest benefit has been IT efficiency,” Thomas said. “Our storage infrastructure is just so much more reliable and robust. If we see a hit in performance or availability we can immediately eliminate many problems right off the bat. We know it’s either a problem with a driver or bandwidth allocation, giving us a head start with troubleshooting a solution.”

According to Smith, he and his staff now spend at least 100 hours less a month maintaining the storage network, allowing them to spend more time on IT projects that directly affect end users and students, such as a new online learning tool the university just launched for remote students. Network simplicity also allows Smith to scale capacity more easily, keeping storage growth more in line with the increasing needs of the Coppin State community. Since migrating to the iSCSI SAN, the storage environment has doubled from 9 TB to 18 TBs.

The price point of the Alacritech iSCSI Scalable Network Accelerators has also been a major benefit to the school’s IT budget, coming in at 50 percent of the cost of similar Fibre Channel cards and saving the school nearly $25,000 in initial capital expenditures. The ease of management further adds to operational savings.

“We’re extremely happy with the way the Alacritech network accelerators have enhanced the performance of our storage network,” Thomas said. “The performance increase they provide made the move to iSCSI a no brainer, giving us a more efficient, better functioning storage environment that we can trust.”

The ease of deployment provided by the Alacritech accelerators will enable the school to systematically migrate one array at a time to ensure that application performance or data availability will not be affected. Thomas said that he is able to simply pop out the cards and install them in five minutes in the new equipment. Other network cards would have added lengthy steps in an already complex migration process.

System Configuration