London, UK, 17 Jul 2018
Educational institutions are dealing with an exponential growth in the amount of data they manage, as students and teachers embrace digital content, connected services and sophisticated experimentation that generate vast amounts of information.
Educational institutions, from school districts to universities, are discovering their legacy storage solutions are unable to keep pace with their data growth and management needs. StorageCraft is solving the problem with an innovative solution, StorageCraft for Education, specifically designed to meet the storage demands of educational organisations.
To survive in today's digital environment, educational organisations need an efficient and affordable way to expand storage and improve data backup and recovery service levels. Unlike existing scale-up solutions, StorageCraft for Education cost-effectively handles the ever-increasing amounts of data that education organisations are grappling with today. Its built-in scale-out abilities accommodate future data storage requirements, which avoids the pitfalls of upfront over-provisioning, and the need for costly and complex forklift upgrades later or the creation of numerous storage islands.
Gone are the days of purchasing excess storage based on a three- to five-year capacity plan. StorageCraft for Education offers either an HDD-based or all-flash solution. The all-flash solution costs less than GBP£0.50 per effective GB.
StorageCraft uniquely enables education institutions to purchase compatible SSDs at retail prices and then scale-out as needed with additional drives or nodes that can be deployed in just minutes. No configuration, no downtime, no application changes. Better still, as the retail price of SSDs continues to decline monthly, education organisations gain important cost savings on future storage purchases.
Highly affordable alternative to cloud-based storage
To save money, many organisations turn to the cloud in the belief it is an inexpensive storage solution. But there's a better way. Over a three-year period, StorageCraft for Education is up to 50% less costly than many public cloud solutions, including Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. And, with inline deduplication and compression, it can be 10x cheaper to own the StorageCraft for Education solution based on OneBlox compared to renting cloud-based storage.
What's more, StorageCraft for Education is accessible locally and on-premises, so data can be quickly recovered at any time. Further, there are no surprise charges, such as unforeseen network fees when admins retrieve the data from the cloud.
"By 2025, data volume will be close to 1 000% more than it is today and legacy storage solutions will not be able to handle that," said Shridar Subramanian, vice-president marketing and product management at StorageCraft. "With StorageCraft, educational institutions don't have to worry about sprawling storage islands. They don't have to deal with cumbersome forklift upgrades when they want to add storage. Thanks to our scale-out storage approach, they can easily purchase the storage they need over time, while taking advantage of drive price declines and improving technology."
Ease of use
Ease of use is another benefit of StorageCraft for Education, and a crucial one for educational institutions because their IT teams are already stretched to capacity. StorageCraft leads the storage industry with StorageCraft OneSystem, a cloud-based management service that enables IT organisations to simply yet powerfully manage on-premises storage in any location from any browser. This means IT administrators spend less time managing storage and it frees up their time to drive strategic initiatives.
StorageCraft OneSystem consistently provides real-time storage and system health monitoring by comprehensively understanding the state of installed disk drives, networks, remotely replicated storage and more. This means potential problems can be identified and resolved before they negatively impact applications.
Leading education institutions have chosen StorageCraft
Many leading educational institutions, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), depend on StorageCraft. Before deciding on StorageCraft, MIT's PSFC, a top research lab whose focus is the development of fusion power as a revolutionary energy source, was searching for a different type of storage solution, one that could also provide higher efficiency around duplication and redundancy.
With StorageCraft, MIT has seen both an increase in cost savings and a decrease in the hours that IT administrators spend on data storage and backup. Other benefits include enhanced uptime and robustness, the system has consistently delivered nearly 100% uptime since implementation, and the ability to manage their storage from any Web browser, anywhere.
Another key benefit of StorageCraft is the "set it and forget it" nature of the platform. "It doesn't need a lot of babysitting after the fact to make sure everything is working," said Lee Berkowitz, MIT's IT and network manager.
Pricing and availability
For a limited time, an entry-level "StorageCraft for Education" disaster recovery configuration includes more than 190TB of effective storage capacity, assuming 3:1 data reduction, and starts at less than GBP£34. It comprises two StorageCraft OneBlox 4312 scale-out distributed object store appliances to deliver both on-premises storage and off-site remote replication. The solution can be installed and available in less than 15 minutes. As more storage is required, users simply add drives and the capacity dynamically expands the same global file system without interrupting applications or users. StorageCraft's multi-site replication feature means in the event of failure, recovery can be achieved in minutes.
"From scale-out storage to backup and disaster recovery, StorageCraft is the comprehensive data management and protection solution that educational institutions have been waiting for," said Subramanian. "They no longer have to lose sleep worrying about storing and protecting data. StorageCraft gives them peace of mind that they can cost-effectively meet the increasing data demands of their professors, students and research teams, and confidence that their data is always safe and secure."
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