Nexsan announced that the Corona-Norco Unified School District has standardized on the Nexsan E60 for its virtual and disaster recovery storage infrastructure. The large school district uses the Nexsan E60, configured with 40 SAS and 20 SATA drives for power-efficient, high density virtual storage of its databases, Exchange-based E: system and overall data protection processes.

The Corona-Norco Unified School District is located approximately 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles in western Riverside County. The large district has 31 elementary schools, seven intermediate/middle schools, five comprehensive high schools, a middle college high school and three alternative schools. With an enrollment of over 53,000 students, it is the largest school district in Riverside County and the tenth largest district in California.

To better support its virtual storage and data protection needs, the large school district made a switch from Fibre Channel-based storage to iSCSI solutions two years ago. "The real driving factors for us were the cost per terabyte, as well as the ability to achieve power savings on arrays and maximize disk capacity on a rack," said Brian Troudy, Network Manager, Corona-Norco Unified School District. "We were never fully satisfied with Fibre Channel SANs because of the high costs and lack of flexibility, which is why we shifted to iSCSI. Nexsan iSCSI storage systems make it easier and more cost-effective to add capacity to our consolidated storage environment."

When making the switch, the school district initially selected Nexsan solutions for their ease of use, high efficiency, and value. After using the Nexsan solutions with great satisfaction, the Corona-Norco School District then selected the next-generation E60 E-Series storage system from Nexsan to consolidate its VMware based application data and further enhance its data protection strategy. The school district is now using the E60’s 40 SAS drives to perform primary storage for its Exchange, database and other critical application data. It then uses 20 SATA drives for disk-based backup for complete protection of its school district information.

“The E60 is very easy to service and maintain,” said Troudy. “Space efficiency is also important to us and with the E60 we can now fit 60 drives in just a 4U space. As a previous Nexsan customer, we have always been impressed by their price, ease of use, density and power savings capabilities. The E60 is even more impressive.”

Among the features that the school district benefits from most is the E60’s power efficient AutoMAID® Technology. Using AutoMAID Level 4 technology, the Norco-Corona Unified School District sees up to an 85% reduction in energy consumption without compromising performance for applications such as digital video storage and backup to disk. This has been particularly important for the school district’s IP video surveillance system and archiving.

"We begin to archive at midnight, and during the day most of the disks on the system are spun down," says Troudy. “We now use AutoMAID on the tiered E60 with AutoMAID active on the SATA drives to save considerable power.”

The Nexsan E-Series features an expandable, high density and high performance platform so that mid-market companies have the enterprise-class features they need today, with the scalability to extend their solution for tomorrow. The E60 accommodates 60 disks for up to 180TB of SATA storage in only 4U of rack space. Using AutoMAID level 4 technology, the E60 is considered the most energy-efficient, enterprise-class storage system on the market.

“When it comes to high density storage, mid-market customers like the Corona-Norco Unified School District want enterprise-class features and performance with the ease of use that makes long term management and maintenance trouble-free,” said Victoria Grey, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Nexsan. “Built for superior density and efficiency, the E60 specifically meets these requirements while offering performance and reliability that is second to none.”