Colleges and Universities Choose EqualLogic SAN Solutions for More Efficient and Responsive Campus Data Centers.

NASHUA, N.H. -- Campus IT Managers Move to New, More Flexible Storage Environments with EqualLogic

National and state universities and colleges across North America have embraced EqualLogic's PeerStorage array solution for a new and cost-effective approach to storage area networks (SANs). Higher education institutions are turning to EqualLogic to consolidate their direct attached storage (DAS) into a flexible and scalable SAN and to cap or replace their expensive and complex Fibre Channel SAN installations.

In the first year of shipping its innovative, all-inclusive SAN technology, EqualLogic has established itself as the leading provider of pure-iSCSI SAN solutions in a fast-growing segment of the $30 billion storage industry. To mark its continued selection as the leading choice in iSCSI SAN solutions for higher education institutions, EqualLogic is highlighting key colleges and universities that have implemented a new virtual storage model to improve the way in which they store, access and manage campus-wide data.

Colleges and universities are choosing EqualLogic's PeerStorage array to create scalable pools of storage for more efficient and flexible data centers that can accommodate the demands of faculty, administrators and students for new applications requiring more and more data storage. Across the board, higher education IT managers are getting more storage and enterprise management features and greater flexibility for on-demand storage provisioning with EqualLogic - at a cost that they can justify even with ongoing budget constraints. The PeerStorage array serves a wide range of applications - from Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server to online learning portals and critical administrative systems - in heterogeneous operating system environments including Windows, NetWare, Linux, HP-UX, and MacOS.

IT managers and CIOs at colleges and universities have deployed EqualLogic's intelligent, self-managing iSCSI SAN solution, including: Boston University Medical Campus, Dartmouth College, Harvard University Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Lawrence University, Mott Community College, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, University of Michigan, Washington and Lee University, and Yale University.

"Universities and colleges are under constant pressure to do more with less, and are looking for innovations in how to better manage their critical data for staff, faculty, students, and alumni," said John Joseph, EqualLogic vice president of marketing. "EqualLogic has created a new paradigm for how SANs are built and managed, clearly giving our education customers what they need - self-managing and scalable pools of storage that can respond nimbly to user demands in mission-critical environments."

EqualLogic's PeerStorage SAN technology allows its higher education customers to immediately consolidate campus-wide storage into a fully redundant, high-performance scalable grid that can keep up with the 24/7 demands of today's technology-driven college campus - while laying the foundation of the virtual data center. Colleges and universities are looking to centralize IT resources into one, virtual utility consisting of three elements: storage, servers and the network, allowing their IT managers to provision computing resources on demand, using a common pool of servers and storage to bring new applications online quickly and easily.

EqualLogic is the only standards-compliant IP SAN solution provider to offer a comprehensive and fully integrated standard feature set at no additional cost to the customer. Each PeerStorage Array 100E supports up to 3.5 terabytes of storage capacity, comes with fully redundant fault-tolerant hardware and includes full-featured automatic storage-management software. Multiple arrays can be combined to form a scalable enterprise storage grid of more than 100 terabytes.

What Higher Education Customers Are Saying

Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

"The F word for us around here is flexibility, and EqualLogic's PeerStorage solution allows us to be as flexible as possible in provisioning and accessing our storage environment," said Joanne Kossuth, chief information officer of Olin College. "As a growing school, we have to prepare the network for anything and be able change it on a dime, and working with EqualLogic allows us to respond easily to these ongoing changes and requests."

Lawrence University

"We've experienced no downside from working with EqualLogic, and in an environment where we have to constantly do more with less, EqualLogic is the ideal storage partner," said Robert Lowe, network manager for Lawrence University. "The PeerStorage array was very easy to implement, and to say it was painless is almost an understatement. We spent more time planning the related network infrastructure than we did implementing the PeerStorage array."

Mott Community College

"EqualLogic has provided us a solution that basically eliminates all points of network failure, creating a bullet-proof data center infrastructure," said Jason Moehlman, IT manager for Mott Community College. "We've been able to put two and a half times the amount of storage on the EqualLogic PeerStorage solution than on our previous NAS solution, allowing us to better consolidate our storage environment and pass these benefits onto our faculty, staff and students."

University of Michigan

"The EqualLogic PeerStorage array allowed us to replace our old Fibre Channel SAN with a new, easier to manage consolidated pool of storage," said Max Zain, director of unit data systems for the Center for Professional Development at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. "The new storage system serves a wide array of applications, from streaming video and our online learning portal to our internal administrative systems, running on a variety of operating systems. We love the ease of use and modular scalability of the PeerStorage platform, which allows us to add more storage as needed - without over provisioning today."

Washington and Lee University

"The EqualLogic PeerStorage solution has opened up many new possibilities that were not previously available to us, and, as we plan new projects, we are taking into account the 'new tricks' that our EqualLogic SAN can offer to learn new, easier ways to deliver the services our students, faculty and staff need," said Jim Bollinger, systems and network engineer for Washington and Lee University. "The PeerStorage array is affordable and easy to use, and since it offers highly advanced features such as storage virtualization, on-demand provisioning, and automated management, we can take advantage of advanced functionality without having to add new staff or new technical skills."

About EqualLogic

EqualLogic(R), Inc., is the leading provider of intelligent, all-inclusive iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions that enable businesses - from Fortune 500 to small and mid-size organizations - to realize the economic benefits of consolidated, self-managing storage. The company's flagship product, the PeerStorage(R) Array 100E, is the industry's first automatic storage platform that delivers operational simplicity, functional integration, and high data availability in a single, scalable pool of storage. EqualLogic's headquarters are located in Nashua, N.H. For more information, please visit http://www.equallogic.com.

EqualLogic and PeerStorage are registered trademarks of EqualLogic, Inc. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.