Nexsan™, a global leader in unified storage solutions, has announced that Corona-Norco Unified School District has deployed Nexsan’s E-Series Model E60™ solution to meet increasing storage demands and accommodate the school districts new video surveillance mandate. CNUSD expects these projects to exceed a petabyte of storage.

Located in Riverside County, California, Corona-Norco has over 53,000 students making it the tenth largest district in California. With more than 20,000 desktops to protect and growing volumes of data, including data generated from a large new video surveillance implementation, the district continued to face difficulties with its existing Fibre Channel-based storage infrastructure and associated high cost per terabyte.

The school district needed a more cost-effective way to provide virtual storage for production data in its VMware environment as well as secondary storage for backup and disaster recovery. Corona-Norco turned to Nexsan.

The Nexsan E60 offers 60 drives in a 4U rack space, providing greater density compared to alternatives. This makes it possible to populate the system with a mix of SAS and SATA drives to align storage performance with application requirements. For Corona-Norco, the Nexsan E60 storage system installation solved all of its performance, density, and value challenges. Corona-Norco also benefitted from the system’s unique power management features, which uses AutoMAID® technology for low power consumption and data center maintenance costs, providing up to 87% energy savings.

The success of the primary implementation provided the foundation for the school district to acquire three more E60 units when it decided to deploy 800 surveillance cameras to improve student safety. The storage requirements were significant with high-definition 5MP cameras shooting in 2K resolution and video needing to be retained for 30 days. The implementation of additional E60 units have also allowed Corona-Norco to backup and protect an additional 50-terabytes of data each night.

“We needed a storage solution optimized for compatibility and performance in virtual environments that could also handle our need for more than a petabyte of storage. Nexsan fit the bill perfectly,” said Brian Troudy, Network Manager, CNUSD. “Nexsan was also the best solution when we decided to deploy video surveillance to all schools in the district. It provided cost-effective storage, especially important for a budget-conscious school district, at a quantity and capacity that no one else in the market can really match.”

“The Corona-Norco Unified School District (CNUSD) is a perfect example of how public institutions are able to manage their increasing storage challenges with the use of flexible, high density and high performance platforms,” said Victoria Grey, Chief Marketing Officer, Nexsan. “Nexsan’s E-Series storage is ideally suited for the video surveillance files and provides complete data protection and backup for the school district’s information.”