Coraid EtherDrive helps Emerson College simplify its VM management

When the three-person IT team at Boston-based Emerson College decided to simplify the communications and arts institution's data center, the first thing to go was tape. Fibre Channel was next.

The college replaced its direct-to-tape backup system with a disk-to-disk off-site replication product, according to Frankie Frain, Emerson's manager of network systems. No surprise there, since many IT groups have gone from tape to disk backup.

Switching from Fibre Channel (FC) to Ethernet storage is also not unheard of, although FC is far from being as endangered as tape. But what Emerson did that was different was to move to two Coraid EtherDrive SRX arrays, rather than a more common iSCSI Ethernet storage system, while it consolidated servers with VMware in May 2012.

Read More