Network Storage Increasing this Week

As a friend and colleague tells me, "no one has ever complained about having too much data storage." With that in mind, this week we are upgrading our Barrington 220 Storage Area Network (SAN) system, providing additional data storage capacity for many of our servers that connect to this SAN system.

Our original Barrington 220 Storage Area Network was put in place in the summer of 2008. The SAN system is used to provide common hard disk space to a multitude of servers, making management and deployment of systems easier and more reliable.

Back in 2008 we added up all of the server storage used throughout the district. We calculated a number of around 1.5 terabytes (1,500,000 megabytes) of data stored on all servers within the district. Armed with that information, we installed a 20-terabyte SAN system in our data center. We also dropped in a 15-terabyte SAN system at our disaster recovery location.

Barrington 220's new SAN system

That original SAN system, as large as we thought it was, held for just several years, and before we knew it, we were in need of more storage capacity. We upgraded to 35 terabytes of data storage at our data center and presently we are provisioning 57 terabytes of raw data storage in our data center with 64 terabytes of storage at our disaster recovery site. We have progressed from 1.5 terabytes of actual data stored in 2008 to the potential of 57 terabytes of storage in 2014. Mind you, a good chunk of this storage is used for redundancies and backups, however, we are on a roll!

With the extra storage space, we hope to be able to continue our district-wide data and server consolidation efforts and also provision additional storage space to staff and students. Stay tuned!