VAR Provides 'Expert' Storage Assistance

Babson, a liberal arts college in Wellesley, Mass., had been using a Fibre Channel SAN from EMC that could hold 2 Tbytes of data, but Director of Architecture and Development Kuljit Dharni wanted to find something easier and less expensive to expand and refresh. He also was considering a new method of server consolidation and virtualization.

Sean Shea, account manager with ESG, introduced Babson to the EqualLogic iSCSI SAN, which last year received a "positive" rating from Gartner—the research firm's second highest rating for iSCSI SAN products.

"One of the things we can demonstrate that sometimes is jaw-dropping to a few people is that we can bring in an EqualLogic array, drop it on the table, plug it into a server and literally have the SAN set up and start to provision storage within 30 minutes," Shea said. "For people who are used to the traditional fibre-based SANs, that process can take a day or so to set up."

Babson held onto the array and gave it a go, testing its scalability and performance in the college's environment. Babson didn't take it easy on the machine.