Nashua, N.H. — April 2, 2007 — EqualLogic® today announced that Colorado State University has standardized on EqualLogic’s PS Series iSCSI SAN for its university-wide deployment of email and calendaring services based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The EqualLogic PS Series’ ease of deployment and management allowed the University to accelerate the rollout of the new collaboration system by months.
Colorado State University (CSU) is ranked among the nation's top public institutions and is home to 25,000 students, 1,400 research associates and more than 7,000 employees. With eight colleges and 55 academic departments, CSU is a leading research university known for its disease research, atmospheric science and environmental science.
Following a mandate from CSU’s IT governance organization, the Academic Computing and Networking Services (ACNS) department moved to consolidate the University’s multiple calendaring applications and update its email infrastructure for faculty and staff. After selecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for the upgrade, CSU evaluated new storage platforms that would support the application and meet their scalability, availability and performance requirements. The ACNS department researched Fibre Channel SANs deployed elsewhere on campus, but balked at the difficulty their peers had experienced in managing and provisioning Fibre Channel storage.
After consulting with Microsoft on performance requirements for Exchange 2007, CSU decided that an enterprise-class iSCSI SAN solution would provide a more effective growth path than a traditional Fibre Channel system, while delivering the high performance needed for the Exchange application. CSU selected and rapidly deployed EqualLogic’s PS Series storage arrays, cutting the time to get the collaboration system in production and maintaining its “No Complaints Policy” for Exchange services.
“The Exchange 2007 deployment has demonstrated how storage should work for any business: reliably, invisibly and easily,” said Dr. Patrick J. Burns, vice president for information technology of Colorado State University. “EqualLogic understands that IT groups want to improve the applications that drive organizational value, not manage plumbing in storage systems. The value EqualLogic has provided for our Exchange upgrade has pushed Colorado State to identify other IT services that would benefit from scalable, low-headache storage.”
Joe Volesky, leader of the Windows Services Group within ACNS, said, “Using EqualLogic for Exchange provided a strategic advantage in reducing the manpower and time dedicated to storage. My Exchange managers were able to stay focused on the new application, and not storage management, because the EqualLogic SAN was so intuitive. A Fibre Channel SAN would have extended the project by several months for consulting sessions, training and configuration and would have required another $200,000 on software and disks to grow our environment as planned.”
CSU’s Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 deployment on the EqualLogic SAN has been in production since September 2006, and has seamlessly tripled in size to support more than 3,000 faculty and staff. Most importantly, the collaboration application and storage have performed perfectly, as the Windows Services Group has received no complaints from its users. Future growth is expected to be simple and non-disruptive, as Volesky’s staff can provision new Exchange volumes with a few mouse clicks and can connect additional PS Series arrays to the SAN with zero downtime or impact on users’ experiences.
“A large percentage of our customers use Exchange Server as their mail and calendaring application,” said Eric Schott, EqualLogic’s senior director of product management. “EqualLogic is committed to providing Exchange Server users with the performance and scalability they need from their storage platform, while delivering market-leading ease of use and comprehensive data protection capabilities. CSU’s Exchange deployment is a perfect example of how EqualLogic’s PS Series SANs enhance the reliability and user experience of business-critical applications.”
About EqualLogic
EqualLogic® makes data storage systems that radically simplify the way mid-size and large businesses store and protect information. EqualLogic’s award-winning PS Series storage area network (SAN) solution provides sophisticated management capabilities that reduce the time and money IT staff spend on storage. EqualLogic serves thousands of customers in 35 countries from its headquarters in Nashua, New Hampshire, and offices throughout Europe and Asia. For more information, please visit http://www.equallogic.com/.
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Media Contacts:
Dylan Locsin
EqualLogic, Inc.
603-249-7940
dlocsin@equallogic.com
Heather Ailara
Racepoint Group, Inc.
781-487-4650
equallogic@racepointgroup.com
