Avere Eliminates 'Boot Storm,' Improves Overall Latency for Massachusetts School District
FXT cluster provides cost-, time-effective solution for virtualized environment
PITTSBURGH - December 6, 2011 - Avere Systems today announced that the Belchertown School District has implemented an Avere Systems FXT Series cluster to improve overall latency and eliminate the write errors and data corruption it experienced after deploying a new student information system application to allow online access to class material, store work, record attendance and grades. The new online system also experienced severe lag time as the number of concurrent users soared.
The Massachusetts-based school district's existing infrastructure consisted of multiple Cisco UCS systems running VMware View connected to data stores residing on a NetApp FAS2020. With as many as 250 users logging into the system at any given time, the VMs supporting the teachers and students experienced very high latency and frequent boot storms that occurred during the first 15 minutes of each class session throughout the school day. During these peak times, users also experienced problems saving their work and potential data corruption.
Facing the time-consuming and expensive option of implementing new, high-performance storage filers, Belchertown School District's IT department decided instead to try to solve the problem using a NAS Optimization solution from Avere. The results were not only impressive, they happened fast as well:
"Avere eliminated the boot storm and turned 15 minutes of logging in per class into three to four minutes with no more write errors or corrupted files," said Scott Karen, the school district's Director of Technology. "Overall latency is no longer an issue and it didn't require me to rethink and re-engineer my storage network... It was a more cost-effective and time-effective way to get those old, slow filers to behave like new, high-end machines. In fact, we call the Avere cluster 'the magic boxes' because of how quickly and easily they solved our problems."
"Forklift upgrades to storage servers are an expensive and often unnecessary solution to an application performance problem," said Ron Bianchini, Avere President and CEO. "Avere's NAS Optimization solutions are VMware Ready certified and give organizations like the Belchertown School District the ability to easily scale application performance in a virtualized environment while protecting the investments they have already made in their infrastructure."
For more details on the Belchertown School District implementation of Avere Systems products, please read the case study online at: www.averesystems.com/MASchoolDistrictCaseStudy.pdf
About Avere Systems
Avere Systems brings to the market NAS Optimization solutions designed specifically to scale performance and capacity separately and take advantage of new storage media using real-time tiering. Avere's products allow organizations to achieve unlimited application performance scaling, free applications from the confines of the data center by eliminating latency and cut storage costs by more than half. Learn more at www.averesystems.com, and you can follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.
