WSIPC simplifies storage and saves thousands in costs with Azure Elastic SAN

Technology services cooperative WSIPC faced challenges with its traditional approach to storage, including costly upgrades. Supporting more than 300 school districts and 10 terabytes’ worth of databases, it wanted to allocate storage more easily and cost effectively.

WSIPC migrated to Microsoft Azure Elastic SAN to dynamically assign storage and improve overall performance and reliability, including for critical backups done in the cloud.

WSIPC staff sleep comfortably knowing backups now perform as scheduled, outside of school hours. They also dynamically size storage and avoid paying upfront for more than they need, saving valuable IT time and thousands in monthly costs.

Achieving shared success in education

The staff at nonprofit Washington School Information Processing Cooperative (WSIPC) align to one philosophy: “Inspired by education. Empowered by technology.” It’s that philosophy-turned-mission that drives business teams as they provide technology solutions, services, and support to K-12 public and private schools across Washington State. Supporting millions of students and educators alike, WSIPC formed 60 years ago as a purchasing cooperative to help schools save money on computer paper and writing software. It has since expanded to support more than 300 school districts along with a special-education consortium, and it represents more than 80% of full-time equivalent students in the state. “We do our best to keep technology as new and fresh as we can while keeping it affordable for the districts,” says Ray Steele, Technical Architect at WSIPC.

As part of its services, WSIPC supports districts by storing their school ERP software, student information, HR and finance systems, and close to 100 other applications. School staff rely on the information in these databases for daily operations. But as WSIPC serves nearly 3 million people with just 25 IT team members, WSIPC looks for ways to streamline IT processes and free up time. WSIPC specifically wanted to change its approach to storage, especially the roadblocks it encountered when it needed to add capacity.

“By switching to Elastic SAN, we get our backups done faster and keep school staff online.”

Jeff Simons, Chief Information Officer, WSIPC

Targeting storage as an area for improvement

WSIPC runs and manages databases, each with terabytes of storage, and storage costs had grown significantly. To manage that storage, technical architects like Steele had to carefully calculate how best to meet workload growth while saving on costs. And when building a server, they had to estimate how many districts would be on it at once because a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) had to be built out ahead of time. “We then also had to pay for it up front, even though we might have only six districts on a disk,” says Steele. “If we knew we’d have another 18 districts on there eventually, we still had to start out by buying the storage for all 18 districts.” For example, if WSIPC was running a terabyte of storage and suddenly needed to add another 300 gigabytes to a disk, the next step up was additional terabytes. He notes, “It got a little pricey just to do incremental upgrades.”

WSIPC wanted to meet its evolving storage needs quickly—without overpaying and with less risk. “At one time in the past, I couldn’t expand or manage disks without downtime,” says Steele. “It was always a little bit spooky for me to basically shut down the server, detach the database that has the members’ data on it, expand it, reattach it, and hope everything works right.”

After Steele learned about Microsoft Azure Elastic SAN preproduction in an Azure Hour for Education session, he and his IT colleagues explored it to see if they could use it for more flexible, less expensive storage. Already experienced with storage area networks (SANs) locally, having elastic functionality would give staff the dynamic ability to allocate storage without doing massive jumps.

“Using Azure Elastic SAN, we cut our backup time from three hours to seven minutes for one of our large databases, and our largest databases run about 940 GB.”

Jeff Simons, Chief Information Officer, WSIPC

“Exactly what we were looking for”

As work started in the new environment, WSIPC IT staff found they would be able to address their storage issues with ease. “We saw that Elastic SAN uses standard iSCSI storage, like our SAN, so no one had to learn a new technology at the operating system level. And the process was scripted, making the connection even easier than what we were doing locally,” says Steele. “When I saw the price point and the fact that we could dynamically assign storage, I knew this would fit exactly what we were looking for.”

WSIPC started its migration by moving smaller district databases to the new storage environment and discovered welcome similarities with its previous storage approach, which helped streamline change management. The company’s IT team is now in the midst of migrating larger district databases to Elastic SAN. “So far, 140 of our districts’ production databases run on Elastic SAN, and 34% of our full-time employees use it,” says Jeff Simons, Chief Information Officer at WSIPC.

For its production environments, WSIPC uses a mix of Azure Premium SSDs and standard hard disk drives (HDDs) with spinning disks. “We could get the spinning disks large and keep the cost down, which was great, but it slowed our backup times because we had to write to a slower disk,” says Steele. “I now write directly to more of the same SAN.”

WSIPC performs full backups every night to populate a training and learning environment. Each full backup can be moved around as needed and stored for archival purposes—but the bigger the database size, the longer the process takes. And the longer the process takes, the bigger the risk of extending into production hours. WSIPC couldn’t take that risk. School administrative staff, business office managers, and others need to get schools ready for the day each morning, and they face slow or even unavailable systems if WSIPC is still running its backups. Says Simons, “By switching to Elastic SAN, we get our backups done faster and keep school staff online.” And now that backups perform reliably overnight, “WSIPC staff sleep better knowing that this in place,” adds Andrew Hepworth, Infrastructure Engineering Manager at WSIPC.

“We have time to think about the next challenge to tackle and direction we want to move, like how to apply AI to improve the services we provide our districts. I like to think that we’re mavericks in the education technology space.”

Andrew Hepworth, Infrastructure Engineering Manager, WSIPC

Cost savings in the thousands and simplified storage management

The entire WSIPC Cooperative felt benefits from the switch to Elastic SAN almost immediately. For example, as districts add to their storage, they use more and more disk space every day. IT staff can now monitor disk activity so the moment a district requests additional gigabytes on an Elastic SAN volume to support growth, it can easily address that as needed on the fly. “The SAN gets only a little bigger as I go, and I only use a bit more storage. So, our costs grow slowly now compared to those previous big jumps,” explains Steele.

As WSIPC increases its use of Elastic SAN, it gains time and cost efficiencies. It’s currently saving about 20% in costs moving SQL Server data drives from managed disks to Elastic SAN, while also dramatically increasing the manageability of its servers. “Using Azure Elastic SAN, we cut our backup time from three hours to seven minutes for one of our large databases, and our largest databases run about 940 GB,” says Simons. Adds Steele, “An unexpected improvement we didn't plan for is that SQL backup jobs now run approximately five times faster. The original SQL server we moved included the backup drive on the Elastic SAN, and this change significantly boosted backup performance. This is particularly helpful since data is always growing, but the backup window remains the same. Our database administrators noticed this fantastic performance boost immediately.” Staff don’t have to worry about firmware or basic input/output system (BIOS) updates because the SAN is fully managed—it just has the performance and reliability there to count on.

WSIPC database administrators benefit from additional new efficiencies, including the ability to dynamically size storage and run backups faster without worrying about maintaining back-end systems. “Because I now write to more of the SAN, the performance is awesome, and our database administrators love it,” says Steele. “Plus, using Elastic SAN makes our recovery time much faster, which is essential given our short window during the night to get a full backup of everything.” Adds Simons, “The performance for backups and other functions we need is so amazing that we now have a project planned to move everything to Elastic SAN.”

With the time gained back, WSIPC’s IT team is focusing on what more they can do within the cloud to maximize their impact. “We have time to think about the next challenge to tackle and direction we want to move, like how to apply AI to improve the services we provide our districts,” says Hepworth. “I like to think that we’re mavericks in the education technology space.”

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