EqualLogic Provides Solution

NASHUA, N.H. -- EqualLogic today announced that Colorado State University has standardized on EqualLogic’s PS Series iSCSI SAN for its university-wide deployment of email and calendaring services based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The EqualLogic PS Series’ ease of deployment and management allowed the University to accelerate the rollout of the new collaboration system by months.

Colorado State University (CSU) is ranked among the nation's top public institutions and is home to 25,000 students, 1,400 research associates and more than 7,000 employees. With eight colleges and 55 academic departments, CSU is a leading research university known for its disease research, atmospheric science and environmental science.

Following a mandate from CSU’s IT governance organization, the Academic Computing and Networking Services (ACNS) department moved to consolidate the University’s multiple calendaring applications and update its email infrastructure for faculty and staff. After selecting Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for the upgrade, CSU evaluated new storage platforms that would support the application and meet their scalability, availability and performance requirements. The ACNS department researched Fibre Channel SANs deployed elsewhere on campus, but balked at the difficulty their peers had experienced in managing and provisioning Fibre Channel storage.

After consulting with Microsoft on performance requirements for Exchange 2007, CSU decided that an enterprise-class iSCSI SAN solution would provide a more effective growth path than a traditional Fibre Channel system, while delivering the high performance needed for the Exchange application. CSU selected and rapidly deployed EqualLogic’s PS Series storage arrays, cutting the time to get the collaboration system in production and maintaining its “No Complaints Policy” for Exchange services.

“The Exchange 2007 deployment has demonstrated how storage should work for any business: reliably, invisibly and easily,” said Dr. Patrick J. Burns, vice president for information technology of Colorado State University. “EqualLogic understands that IT groups want to improve the applications that drive organizational value, not manage plumbing in storage systems. The value EqualLogic has provided for our Exchange upgrade has pushed Colorado State to identify other IT services that would benefit from scalable, low-headache storage.”

EqualLogic Inc.