Now that the testing phase was completed and they were ready to move into deployment, that meant starting to decommission some of their iSCSI arrays and rolling out a series of DataON Storage CIB solutions over a multi-year program. This meant integrating the old and the new solutions, ensuring data protection, meeting service level agreements and driving a clear path for the future.
As we mentioned in our Microsoft Storage Strategy blog, one element of the Microsoft storage strategy is to provide legacy support for traditional SANs and a migration path to software defined storage with Microsoft’s Storage Spaces and Azure cloud based storage in the future. Rose-Hulman followed this multi-tiered, multi-step approach and will take a few years to migrate all of their applications and VMs. Step one was to begin the migration of 80 Hyper-V VMs from 1GbE iSCSI to Windows Server 2012 R2 with Storage Spaces.
Step two was to move their ERP system. Today they are running an instance of Banner by Ellucian, an ERP system tailored for the higher education sector. For this, they chose the DataON CIB-9224 V12 hyper-converged Cluster-in-a-Box platform supporting a concurrent deployment of dual-node Hyper-V clusters and Storage Spaces managed Scale-Out File Serving services. The administrators for the deployed databases are in the process of building VM templates for the computing environments so they can quickly deploy new modules. They expect to have six to ten hyper-converged VMs running in the appliance, with as many as 30-35 VMs running on the cluster when it’s in full production in 18 months. Rose-Hulman is thoroughly pleased with performance, cost saving and ease of deployment in the DataON hyper-converged appliance rollout.
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