Qlogic SANbox 1400 Supplementary Manual

Jefferson
Union High
School District
QLogic and Hitachi Data Systems

End Data Truancy at School District

Challenge

Find a scalable and cost-effective storage area network (SAN)
for student projects, coursework, and administrative records
at a mid-sized school district.

Solution

The Hitachi Data Systems Plug-and-Play SAN Kit includes
®
everything needed for a complete SAN in Microsoft
Server environments: QLogic SANbox
™ ®
switching components (one 10-port, 2Gbps QLogic SANbox
Express 1400 switch, QLogic HBAs, connectors, cables,
drivers), as well as a 2TB Hitachi Data Systems AMS200
TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage unit that can scale
™
to up to 41TB of storage.

Result

The HDS SAN kit allows students and teachers to keep all
their work on the scalable SAN instead of limited server
direct-attached storage (DAS ), which required deleting old
documents to make way for new files. Centralized storage
keeps the district in compliance with state funding mandates
that require immediate access to attendance records.
A commitment to using computers in education has put data storage at the top of the
list of required school supplies at the Jefferson Union High School District (JUHD) in
northern California. The over 5,000 students in the district's five schools rely on storage
to hold homework assignments, which are often submitted electronically in the form of
Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and html documents.
Teachers in the district need more storage for their work as well, including attendance
records, grades, lesson plans, class assignments, and e-mail. In addition, district
administrators need access to student records and human resources information
about staff.
Yet until recently, finding information was time-consuming because information was
spread across direct-attached storage devices on servers used for file serving, e-
mail, and printing. "People had to look on multiple servers to find the information they
needed," said Lou Silberman, director of IT at JUHD.
Absentee Data Affects School District Performance
Because of a limited amount of storage on some servers, server crashes were a regular
occurrence. "This impacted productivity in the classroom and our administrative
Windows
®
offices," said Silberman, "It was difficult for students and teachers to reap the benefits
Express 1000
®
of computer-based education. We could have continued to add disks to servers, but
in the long run, this was too labor-intensive and the delays and disruptions required
to get more storage installed made it impossible to meet our users' needs," he said.
"Instead, we limited storage-per-user as a stop-gap measure to prevent the server
crashes. Students were given 20MB at the beginning of the year, while teachers were
given only 200MB to hold all their records. Unfortunately, these limitations meant that
users frequently had to delete old files to make way for new documents."
Limited storage capacity also had an impact on district finances, Silberman said.
"California pairs funding with student attendance records. We needed more storage to
make sure we could store and quickly find every document affecting financial support,"
he said. "But because our DAS system was unwieldy, we were hesitant to digitize old
administrative files—and this meant that teachers and support staff wasted a great
deal of time looking for paper records in filing cabinets," Silberman added.
"Now that all servers share a central storage pool, we can expand the ways in
which we use information technology. With the Plug-and-Play SAN Kit, our com-
puter concerns revolve around possibilities instead of problems."
— Lou Silberman, Director of IT, Jefferson Union High School District
C A S E S T U D Y