Su!e" S#$yIHCC Slashes Power Costs by 100X with VMware View on NetApp

Customer ProfileIndian Hills Community College (IHCC) is one of 15 community colleges in the state of Iowa. Founded in 1966, the college offers a diversity of academic programs and online courses to its more than 8,000 students. The college’s district spans 10 counties in southeast Iowa, though students come to Indian Hills from throughout the state of Iowa, across the nation, and even around the globe. There are students from 24 countries on 6 continents enrolled in classes at the college. IHCC’s main campus is in Ottumwa, Iowa. (Source: www.indianhills.edu)

The ChallengeOptimizing IT budget and resourcesIndian Hills Community College is dedi-cated to excellence in educational opportunity, economic development, cultural understanding, and social enrichment. IHCC students engaged in the college’s degree, diploma, and cer-tificate programs develop the skills and knowledge needed to grow in their areas of interest and excel in their careers. Students can take on-campus and online courses from academic divi-sions that include Arts and Sciences,

Health Occupations, Skill Building, Customized Learning, High School Pro-grams, and the college’s particular area of expertise, Advanced Technologies.

Offering more technology programs than any other community college in the state of Iowa, IHCC leverages its own technological expertise to ensure that its IT services meet the intensive and changing needs of staff and stu-dents. Steady growth in recent years in areas such as online learning, along with significant state funding cuts, have led the organization to search for opportunities to streamline IT opera-tions and reduce expenses.

“As a community college, IHCC pro-vides a very cost-effective way for stu-dents to further their educational and career paths and engage in programs they’re passionate about,” says Shane Molyneux, chief information officer at IHCC. “To help keep tuition low, we need to remain diligent about reducing costs in our IT environment while still delivering superior services to students and staff.”

The college’s aging SAN infrastructure and physical server sprawl contributed

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

IndustryHigher Education

The ChallengeDeliver superior IT services in the midst of budget cuts and with an aging IT infrastructure.

The SolutionRun a highly efficient virtual desktop and server environment with NetApp® FAS3240 storage system and VMware®.

BenefitsDeploy virtual servers in minutes versus hours for physical serversAchieve 2-hour RPO Decrease storage requirements by up to 80%Reduce physical servers from 40 to 3, saving power and cooling costsSupport campuswide green initiative; reduce electrical costs by 100x

Another NetApp solution delivered by:

SM

“By virtualizing more and more desktops and running them centrally on NetApp storage, we’re greatly reducing IT staff mileage to the campuses across our 10-county region. This not only reduces costs, but also frees up our staff for important projects that help further our educational mission.”Shane MolyneuxChief Information Officer, Indian Hills Community College

to excessive data center management, power, and cooling costs. With 11 campus sites, the college’s physical desktop environment was maintenance intensive, at risk from frequent random software downloads by students, and costly. Computing inefficiencies, perfor-mance issues, an expanding data cen-ter footprint, and a growing campus green initiative drove IT management to investigate a new storage solution to support both server and desktop virtualization.

Data protection and disaster recovery activities such as backing up to tape and moving the tapes off site created IT management and data restoration challenges. The team wanted to enhance its disaster recovery plan with robust backup and recovery capabilities and a disaster recovery site that would help provide business continuity.

The SolutionAdvanced server and desktop virtualizationIHCC worked with IP Pathways – a value-added reseller focusing on data storage and management, core networking and virtualization, unified systems, and appli-cation performance and security – to design the right solution to address its growing data center challenges. Working together, IP Pathways and the college

selected NetApp FAS3240 storage sys-tems for IHCC’s primary data center and FAS2040 systems for its Centerville, Iowa, disaster recovery site.

IHCC made the transition from physical to virtual servers on NetApp storage and rolled out virtual desktops in the college’s computer labs and libraries. The IT team leverages the VMware vSphere® 5 virtualization platform with VMware View™ 5 to deliver its end-user computing environment, which today includes close to 500 virtual desktops. VMware View enables IHCC users to connect to their virtual desktops from PCs, thin or zero clients, and mobile devices such as iPad® tablets and Android smartphones.

“Through virtualizing on the unified NetApp storage platform, we’ve been able to accommodate steady data growth and manage our storage envi-ronment with two full-time employees, a number that hasn’t changed in five years,” says Molyneux. “It’s a good thing that storage management has gotten easier with NetApp.” To further reduce expenses, the college is replacing some of its workstations with Wyse P20 and X50c Thin Clients, which reduces hard-ware costs by more than 50%.

IHCC protects its storage systems by replicating data daily from its primary to secondary data centers using NetApp

SnapMirror® technology. NetApp Snap-shot™ and SnapRestore® technologies help the college protect data locally with incremental backups that occur hourly for critical applications such as Datatel Colleague and every few hours or daily for other applications.

The highly efficient data center environ-ment is supported by NetApp Data ONTAP® 8 software operating in 7-Mode, NetApp multiprotocol connectivity for the college’s CIFS and NFS network protocols, as well as Cisco® Nexus® 5548 10Gb switches. NetApp provides the storage efficiency imperative to accommodating budget cutbacks and growth in areas such as online learning, which has seen class enrollment double in the past few years and the number of online classes offered approach 200.

NetApp deduplication and Flash Cache drive the efficiency and performance that help IHCC optimize its technology investment. The college is reducing storage requirements by up to 80% with NetApp deduplication. NetApp Flash Cache, which combines storage efficiency technologies and intelligent caching, boosts IHCC system perfor-mance by prioritizing workloads and ultimately reduces the college’s storage costs.

Business BenefitsCost efficiency with virtual desktopsIHCC is achieving significant opex and capex benefits with its virtual desktop environment. Many computer labs were underutilized at times, but were pow-ered up consuming energy and aging the hardware. To keep systems up to date, campus IT upgraded hundreds of PCs one by one across the college’s 11 sites. IT issues such as hard-drive crashes and viruses also had to be addressed at the physical workstation site, often a remote location.

Today, IHCC deploys and manages the desktop environment and applica-tions centrally from the data center. “By virtualizing increasingly more desktops and running them centrally on NetApp storage, we’re greatly reducing IT staff mileage to the campuses across our 10-county region,” says Molyneux. “This not only reduces costs, but also frees up our staff for important projects that help further our educational mission.”

Running thin clients on NetApp storage in IHCC’s virtual desktop environment has reduced desktop power costs by a factor of 100 to .004 of a cent per day. The college has simplified desktop management with the ability to upgrade or deploy new desktop applications from the data center, plus manage all desktops day to day as a single pool of resources.

“We can now deploy a new virtual desk-top in under 10 minutes as opposed to the 1 to 2 hours required for each physi-cal desktop, and upgrade applications such as Microsoft® Windows® on all desktops at once in minutes by simply building the parent image and pushing it out,” says Molyneux. System mainte-nance activities appear seamless to end users – from nursing students to tech-nology professors – who overall report performance improvements in the highly efficient VMware View desktop environ-ment on high-performance NetApp FAS3240 storage systems.

Reducing server sprawlIHCC also leverages NetApp storage and VMware for server virtualization, and to date has reduced 40 physical servers to 3. “Physical servers and an inefficient storage environment caused data center power and cooling costs to continue to rise, which we’ve been able to mitigate by virtualizing on NetApp,” notes Moly-neux. The college has virtualized Micro-soft Exchange 2010, Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 and 2008, Oracle® Data-base 10g™ for its library system, and its mission-critical Datatel Colleague ERP on approximately 60 virtual machines running on NetApp storage. The IT staff can deploy virtual servers on NetApp in less than two minutes.

Eliminating tape backups, enhancing business continuityNetApp backup and recovery capabili-ties are streamlining IT management for IHCC while better protecting valuable academic and operational data. Using NetApp SnapMirror, IHCC has com-pletely eliminated manual, time-consum-ing tape backups and enhanced its disaster recovery plan with two-hour RPOs. IHCC leverages storage experts from IP Pathways to help enable disas-ter recovery success. “Given budget constraints, our IT staff must be diverse, so we depend on IP Pathways experts to complement our in-house IT strengths. Their expertise in areas such as disaster recovery and virtualization is invaluable to IHCC.”

SnapRestore offers an easy way for users to retrieve inadvertently deleted data. “Recently, an administrative staff member accidentally deleted important files and we showed her how easy it is to locate the latest file version in her on-screen directory and restore it,” says Molyneux. “From an IT management perspective, we didn’t have to track down off-site tapes, and our employee was able to quickly get back to work. That’s a huge operational improvement.”

As IHCC benefits from the efficiencies that server and desktop virtualization running on NetApp provide, the college

Figure 1) IHCC Storage Infrastructure.NetApp FAS3240 storage system supports the virtual desktop and server environment, including 500 virtual desktops and virtualized Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008, Oracle10g Database environments, and Datatel Colleague. IHCC replicates data daily from its primary to its secondary data center with NetApp SnapMirror. NetApp Snapshot and SnapRestore protect data locally with scheduled backups.

Primary Data Center

NetApp SnapMirrorNetApp Snapshot

NetApp SnapRestore

VMware vSphere 5

Cisco Nexus 5548 10Gb switches

NetApp Flash CacheNetApp DeduplicationNetApp FAS3240 running

Data ONTAP 8 operating in 7-mode

NetApp FAS2040

DR Site

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008

Datatel Colleague SolutionOracle 10g Database

VMware View 5

Wyse P20 and X50c Thin Clients

500 virtual desktops

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

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© 2012 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, Inc. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, Data ONTAP, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. VMware and vSphere are registered trademarks and VMware View is a trademark of VMware, Inc. iPad is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. Cisco and Nexus are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. Microsoft, Windows, and SQL Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered trademark and Oracle10g is a trademark of Oracle Corporation. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.CSS-6564-0612

will continue to identify opportunities to stretch its tight IT budget further. In the meantime, IT management is investigat-ing exciting new services for students and educators, with projects on the horizon such as remote, off-campus desktops.

“Through virtualizing on the unified NetApp storage platform, we’ve been able to accommodate steady data growth and manage our storage environment with two full-time employees, a number that hasn’t changed in five years. It’s a good thing that storage management has gotten easier with NetApp.”Shane MolyneuxChief Information Officer, Indian Hills Community College

SOLUTION COMPONENTS

NetApp ProductsNetApp FAS3240 and FAS2040 storage systems

Data ONTAP 8.0 operating in 7-Mode

Flash Cache

Snapshot technology

SnapRestore

SnapMirror

Deduplication

Protocols CIFS

NFS

Third-Party Products Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008

VMware View 5.0

VMware vSphere 5.0

Cisco Nexus 5548 10Gb switches

Oracle10g Database

Datatel Colleague

Wyse P20 and X50c Thin Clients

Partner IP Pathways www.ippathways.com