Case Study: East Antrim Institute
Solution OverviewCustomer ProfileEast Antrim Institute of Further and Higher Education, with three locations in Antrim County, Northern Ireland, provides vocational, pre-university, and lifelong learning for more than 1,300 full-time and 12,000 part-time students. Business SituationThe institute needed an easy-to-implement, centralized storage solution that would enable students and faculty to easily locate work for any class. SolutionEast Antrim Institute installed a Windows® Powered NAS solution with 2.1 terabytes of storage. Benefits
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Company Overview
East Antrim Institute for Further and Higher Education, with three locations in Antrim County, Northern Ireland, is dedicated to providing students with the training that they need for a career, to proceed to the university level, or just for lifelong learning. The institute currently has more than 1,300 full-time and 12,000 part-time students.
Business Challenge
The institute set up its first network on the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server operating system and implemented an Active Directory® directory service infrastructure in the spring of 2000. At the beginning of the 2002 academic year, East Antrim Institute had more than 500 PCs, connected to the Internet through a 2-Mbps link.
The institute implemented Roaming Profiles within the Windows 2000 IntelliMirror® management technologies to enable faculty and students to access their saved work from a PC in any classroom. Because the files were distributed over multiple servers, large profiles had to be moved back and forth between the PCs and the server. Over time, the institute's information systems (IS) department rolled out more IntelliMirror features and wanted to implement Folder Redirection, which would redirect user files to a central server. However, first the department needed to set up a central server for storage and file serving.
The institute purchased a Linux-based network attached storage (NAS) device that was supposed to integrate seamlessly with Active Directory in a Windows 2000-based environment. "We were told that we could plug it into the network, and it would work immediately with Active Directory," says Michael Kane, Information Systems Manager for East Antrim Institute. "However, it didn't work."
After a series of conversations with the supplier, the institute still couldn't get the device to work, so the IS department contacted FMS (NI) Ltd., the first Intel Premier Provider in Northern Ireland, to find another solution. "FMS told us about a Windows Powered NAS solution that provides reliable, scalable file serving and more storage for less money," Kane says. "We tested the Windows Powered NAS and found that the advanced features, such as Persistent Storage Manager and Storage Manager, and the high-reliability features met virtually all our requirements. It can do the work of three file servers with one unit, and it provides advanced data protection features that aren't available on a regular server."
Solution
FMS provided the institute with a Windows Powered NAS solution consisting of an Intel-based 5U chassis server with 1.1 terabytes of storage. In addition, East Antrim bought another Windows 2000 Server license, reformatted the Linux-based server, installed Windows 2000 Server on it, and set up another Windows Powered NAS with an additional terabyte for storing the very large files of the E-Media department locally on that department's segment of the network.
"Once the IS administrators had purchased the Windows Powered NAS and saw how easy it was to get it up and running, administer it, and add users and files, they decided that they would just take the Linux software off the original box, put the Windows software on, and put it back to work," says Sam Gaw, Director of Server & Networking Technologies for FMS (NI) Ltd.
The students' and staff's day-to-day work created in the classroom is stored on the Windows Powered NAS device, with the students' work on one set of drives and the staff's on another. Each student and staff member has a Windows 2000 account. Because Windows Powered NAS integrates seamlessly with Active Directory, East Antrim administrators are able to take advantage of Group Policy settings to control which files students and faculty can access. Administrators also take advantage of IntelliMirror management technologies, such as Roaming Profiles, to enable students and faculty to log on in any classroom. In addition, the Folder Redirection feature points users back to the central storage area to access their files and folders.
While the IntelliMirror features enable students to access their documents from any PC, all files stay on the server and are only transferred across the network if and when it's required, which significantly reduces the use of LAN bandwidth. Active Directory also fully supports the Kerberos authentication protocol to provide students and faculty with fast, single sign-on to all Windows 2000-based resources.
Business Benefits
Low Acquisition and Management Costs
The East Antrim Institute IS staff has found the Windows Powered NAS solution to be extremely cost-effective in terms of initial acquisition costs as well as administration and potential expansion, which makes it easier to justify to the school's budget committee. "With the Windows Powered NAS we're probably getting two and a half times the storage that we had with the Linux-based unit for about the same money," Kane says.
One of the things that makes the Windows Powered NAS so reasonably priced is its ability to use IDE drives, which are relatively inexpensive, in addition to SCSI and Fiber. "If one of the IDE drives goes down, it's really inexpensive to replace, which is great if all you need is storage," Kane says. "The NAS can also take SCSI device drives, so if you're using it for a database, you can load up SCSI drives and get premium performance."
Because administering the Windows Powered NAS is no different from administering any other Windows 2000-based server, the institute's IS department already had the skills to manage it. "If we need to go into the box, we don't need any additional training," Kane says. "Because the Windows Powered NAS is based on an optimized version of Windows 2000, we can pop on to it through a Web browser or go through Terminal Services [part of Windows 2000 Server] and administer it just like the other servers. The advanced, high-reliability features help us to lower our cost of ownership."
"The Windows Powered NAS solution definitely beat the Linux-based solution on a cost-per-megabyte basis," Kane says. "Then, when you add its ease of management and the fact that I don't have to retrain my staff to work with it, it really enables us to do a lot more for less money."
Easy Access, Flexible Expansion
Before the Windows Powered NAS was installed, students stored their work on a series of servers. Each classroom had a main subfolder, and each student had a folder inside that subfolder. As a result, students had to wade through 30, 40, or even 50 student folders to find their own work on each PC. If they wanted to locate a file from another class, they'd have to go through the whole process again. With the Windows Powered NAS, rather than look for their files and folders in different locations on multiple servers, East Antrim students and faculty can find all their files in one central location, no matter which classroom or PC they log on from.
Because this NAS solution offers such a low cost per megabyte, the institute can affordably expand its storage just by adding drives. The Microsoft Distributed File System functionality in Windows 2000 enables the institute to unite files on different computers into a single name space so that they can add capacity while making the expansion seamless to end users. The FMS Windows Powered NAS can expand to 18.1 terabytes of storage. With that potential storage capacity, administrators can defer limiting the storage capacity for each student until they know how much disk space each student realistically needs.
In addition, East Antrim is looking at introducing a virtual learning environment that will enable students to access material from Web sites, either for distance learning or just to aid them in completing their work when they're away from the classroom. "More and more digital material is being created, which means that we need to create more and more digital storage," Kane says. "With the Windows Powered NAS, we've got storage capacity that meets our needs and can scale to take anything we throw at it. If we find that the 2 terabytes is not enough, we will buy another drive cage and plug it into the interface of the main unit to increase our capacity. We don't have to worry about whether the server chassis is big enough to take it, or whether we're going to have to update all the hard disks that we currently have in stock to larger-capacity disks."
Easy Setup
With just five people in East Antrim Institute's IS department to support 1,300 full-time and 12,000 part-time students as well as the faculty, ease of use and management are critical requirements of any new technology solution. "We set up the Windows Powered NAS in five minutes," Kane says. "We just plugged it into the network, changed the default name, gave it a static IP address, and then added users and their files. We already have Windows 2000 management skills in house, so it didn't require any additional training."
Peace of Mind
The security provided by the Windows Powered NAS is also a big benefit for East Antrim Institute. "We always know what's going on with a Windows Powered NAS box on the network," Kane says. "If you have a Linux box on your network and you have no Linux experience, how do you know that there's not a user logged on to that box across the network, trying to do things to the box or to the rest of your network because they've been able to gain access through the Linux box?"
Kane also was able to easily add antivirus software and tape backup agents to the Windows Powered NAS to help ensure that user data isn't lost. For further insurance, the institute uses advanced features such as Persistent Storage Manager, which takes point-in-time copies of the data. "With Persistent Storage Manager, we take snapshots once or twice a week so that if somebody loses something or by mistake deletes an important presentation or file, we don't have to wade through tapes and try to find a file. Instead, we just go to the NAS backup and lift it off pretty quickly."
The Windows Powered NAS solution enables FMS to provide its clients with affordable, flexible, turnkey NAS solutions. "The Windows Powered NAS allows us to offer clients a network storage solution that they can slide into a rack in a corner and that just keeps doing what it's supposed to do," Gaw says. "It's a set-and-forget type of solution."
