Saint Michael's College Selects And Deploys The Nasuni Service For Infinitely Scalable And Secure Primary Storage

College Now Has a Storage Solution That Empowers IT to Effortlessly Manage Explosive Data Growth While Dramatically Simplifying the Backup and Recovery of Users' Files

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Nasuni

Feb 18, 2015, 08:58 ET

NATICK, Mass., Feb. 18, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Nasuni^®, a provider of enterprise storage to global organizations, today announced that Saint Michael's College, a private liberal arts college located on a 400-acre campus near Burlington, Vermont, is using the Nasuni Service to provide more than 3,000 users with fast and secure access to more than 12 TB of operational and academic data. The college's IT organization replaced its existing storage infrastructure with the Nasuni Service in an effort to provide an even higher level of support to students, faculty and staff even as the amount of data on its network continues to grow exponentially.

The existing infrastructure for storage, backup and disaster recovery at Saint Michael’s College was getting so complex and difficult to manage that additional outsourced help was required just to support it. Data had grown to the point where backup could not be completed in a day. With The Nasuni Service, Saint Michael’s addressed its storage infrastructure challenge with a single solution that combines storage, backup and DR with unlimited scalability that can be easily managed by one person.

Click for a video interview with Joe Pawlaczyk, Associate Director of the IT Data Center and Shawn Umansky, Network Engineer, at Saint Michael's College. [http://www.nasuni.com/case-studies/saint-michaels-college/]

Prior to deploying the Nasuni Service, the IT team at St. Michael's faced two big challenges. The amount of data it had to manage was growing rapidly, putting an increasing strain on the college's network resources. In addition, while a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Project completed several years ago had ensured the redundancy of all critical systems, the cost of scaling the college's storage infrastructure at the production data center and the failover was exorbitant.

"We always try to maintain a balance where four of us are managing our data centers and networks across the 50 buildings we support on campus so that the remainder of our team can focus on addressing users' daily needs," said Joe Pawlaczyk, associate director of the IT data center at St. Michael's. "But it was clear we couldn't continue to provide that level of service and also keep our costs in check if something didn't change. It was far too expensive to purchase the hardware we continually had to buy to scale. Plus, as the amount of data we had grew, between two storage area networks, tape and additional disk storage, we couldn't back everything up in 24 hours. And even after we backed everything up, recovering files for our users was complex, time consuming and difficult."

In addition, the constraints placed on the storage infrastructure all too often prevented the IT team from supporting new data-intensive projects that required additional storage capacity.

"While we always did our best to predict how much capacity we would need, the costs were so high to scale, it invariably meant that we couldn't provide storage support for some projects," adds Shawn Umansky, network engineer at St. Michael's. "That reality was at odds with our mission to help all of our departments in any way we can."

The IT team at St. Michael's looked to the cloud for a solution, with several caveats. High performance for end-users was crucial. The solution also needed to be easy to manage, intuitive, cost effective and secure, with the college maintaining complete control over all of its data. Finally, the team at St. Michael's wanted a partner with a proven track record for fast and thorough support.

In light of these criteria, St. Michael's chose and deployed the Nasuni Service. Because Nasuni caches the most frequently used data inside the Nasuni Filer appliances on-site, users noticed no difference in performance. In addition, the Nasuni Service backs up the environment automatically, as often as every 60-seconds, and recovery of any data, from word processing documents to multi-terabyte data volumes, requires just a few mouse clicks – enabling St. Michael's IT department to do in minutes what used to take hours or days.

Scalability also ceased to be an issue. When the need for more storage capacity arises, IT simply contacts Nasuni to request more capacity, which can be available in minutes. And with built-in anti-virus support and all encryption keys held only by St. Michael's, the security of the college's data is never in question.

"Now we pay for the storage we use and add more capacity when needed," Pawlaczyk said. "And backup and recovery is a snap. Support is likewise fantastic. If I phone with a question, Nasuni's engineers answer immediately. Most importantly our data is safe and our end users are happy. We wanted a storage partner that would address our needs and Nasuni delivered. We don't have to think about storage anymore because the Nasuni Service just plain works."

"The days of perpetually investing in big iron and spinning disks are over," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. "The Nasuni Service radically transforms storage by delivering infinite scalability while simultaneously making automatic backup, instantaneous restore and centralized data management a reality. Storage doesn't have to be a headache for IT."

About Nasuni
Nasuni is an enterprise storage company that provides global organizations with a powerful, unified storage service. By combining on-premises hardware and software with cloud storage, Nasuni delivers a secure data storage solution that provides high performance for users, simplified and centralized management for IT, and an easily scalable, complete storage service for the global enterprise. Nasuni is privately held and based in Natick, Mass. For more information, visit www.nasuni.com.

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