Toronto District School Board Calls on EMC's VNX, Data Domain to Advance Education Initiatives

EMC Press Release

Toronto District School Board Calls on EMC's VNX, Data Domain to Advance Education Initiatives

Canada's Largest School District Lowers Capacity Requirements by 32% and Boosts Performance for Microsoft Applications by 21%

HOPKINTON, Mass. - August 14, 2012

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that The Toronto District School Board (TDSB), the largest school board in Canada and fourth largest district in North America, has transformed its 325-terabyte storage infrastructure with EMC® VNX® unified storage and EMC Data Domain® deduplication storage systems for backup and recovery with the help of EMC Residency Services. Through storage consolidation, Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization and a FLASH 1st strategy, TDSB, running the Microsoft Productivity Suite, is achieving dramatic improvements in performance and efficiency while enhancing student learning and teacher collaboration. Leveraging a, FLASH 1st strategy to combines a small amount of Flash capacity with the FAST Suite, has transformed the way TDSB configures its IT environment. As TDSB grows, it expects a 38% reduction in Flash tier costs with new storage efficiency enhancements.

Customer Benefits:

• Reduced Footprint & Energy Costs—As a result of server consolidation with Hyper-V and a transition from an all SAS configuration to a FLASH 1st  strategy, TDSB saw a reduction in capacity requirements by 32% and a decrease in energy expenses by 22%
• Better Performance for Microsoft Applications—TDSB's FLASH 1st strategy has resulted in an overall storage performance increase of 21%, powering faster Microsoft SQL transactions and improved collaboration among staff and students.
• Increased Backup Efficiency—Using EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems, TDSB's data backup storage requirements have been decreased by over 90%.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

TDSB is comprised of 600+ schools, 250,000 students and 40,000 staff members. With tight budgets and rapid data growth, TDSB needed to lower its cost per terabyte and increase storage density without requiring additional data center space in order to continue to provide a high level of IT services to faculty, staff and students. TDSB faced challenges with its backup windows, which were running into school hours and impacting performance.

Residents from EMC Global Services provided skills support and knowledge transfer, enabling TDSB to transform its IT infrastructure with EMC VNX. Previous disparate Block-level and network-attached storage (NAS) were consolidated onto a single, unified VNX solution, running its mission-critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint, Office, OCS, and Dot Net Nuke (CMS) as well as SAP. EMC Residency Services helped speed time to value of TDSB's new technology implementation and improved the management and support of its information infrastructure.

By employing a FLASH 1st strategy on their VNX, TDSB has seen an increase in performance and a substantial improvement in storage efficiency. Previously, the IT team had to purchase an abundance of Fibre Channel drives, with some being underutilized while others were over-subscribed. With Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) and FAST Cache along with a mix of Flash and high-capacity, cost effective disk drives, the data is automatically placed on the most appropriate drive type, saving valuable resource time and smoothing out unexpected bursts in activity. TDSB credits the FLASH 1st strategy and Hyper-V virtualization for the enhanced management simplicity and overall reduction in both CapEx and OpEx.

In addition, TDSB replaced its tape backup environment with EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems, resulting in reduced backup times and a decrease in backup storage requirements by over 90%.

Customer Quotes:

Peter Singh, Senior Manager, IT Operations, Toronto District School Board

"EMC's VNX unified storage has the best performance and efficiency at a very cost-effective price. It integrates with Microsoft Hyper-V, which is crucial to our cloud strategy, and with its higher performance, automated storage tiering, and thin provisioning, VNX was a no-brainer."

"Implementing a 'FLASH 1st' strategy on VNX helped us attain a greener data center, reducing our storage space by 32% and decreasing our power cost by 22%. We actually received a rebate from our electric company because of the savings.”

"EMC's Residency offering was one of the best services we've used from any vendor. To have an EMC expert on site, working as an extension of our staff, was priceless. It allowed us to move forward with the project much more quickly than doing everything ourselves."

Zain Bhamjee, System Architect, Toronto District School Board

"With a storage infrastructure that's reached 325 terabytes and growing, we're always looking for ways to leverage our IT dollars to bring the most value to our teachers and students. EMC's comprehensive array of storage, software, and services are enabling us to transform and achieve the most efficiency, performance, and scalability we've seen yet. Additionally, the new features for the VNX family, including lower starting costs for Flash configurations, are exciting additions to these existing advantages--we're looking forward to reaping the cost and efficiency benefits of these new capabilities."

"Tasks that once took five clicks now get done in one with Unisphere. We're supporting our 325-terabyte storage environment with less than one and a half FTEs. Most shops would need three to five FTEs to manage an infrastructure our size."

Additional Resources:

• Customer Profile: Toronto District School Board
• Analyst Paper: Saving Time and Money with Savvy Use of Flash in Automated Storage Tiering
• White Paper: EMC Multisite Disaster Recovery for Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• Learn more about EMC VNX and Data Domain
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

Sandia to Help IT Professionals w/ DNS Vulnerabilities

News release from Sandia Labs:

January 11, 2012

Sandia cyber project looks to help IT professionals with complex Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerabilities

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Sandia National Laboratories computer scientist Casey Deccio has developed a visualization tool known as DNSViz to help network administrators within the federal government and global IT community better understand Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) and to help them troubleshoot problems. (Click here to see a short video of Deccio discussing the DNSViz tool.)

Sandia computer scientist Casey Deccio developed a software tool called DNSViz to help network administrators with Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerabilities. DNSViz provides a visual analysis of the DNSSEC authentication chain for a domain name and its resolution path in the DNS namespace. 

DNSSEC is a security feature mandated for all federal information systems by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The 2008 mandate requires that “the top level .gov domain will be DNSSEC-signed, and processes to enable secure delegated sub-domains will be developed.”

The entity that serves to translate the hostname of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into an Internet Protocol (IP) address is known as the Domain Name System (DNS). A DNS “lookup” is a prerequisite for doing almost anything on the Internet, including Web browsing, emailing or videoconferencing.

Although the mandate made perfect sense, said Deccio, there soon emerged a problem when .gov organizations actually began deploying DNSSEC.

“DNSSEC is hard to configure correctly and has to undergo regular maintenance,” he said. “It adds a great deal of complexity to IT systems, and if configured improperly or deployed onto servers that aren’t fully compatible, it keeps users from accessing .gov sites. They just get error responses.”

The still-new DNSSEC security feature is designed to allow user applications like Web browsers to ensure that the IP addresses they have received from the DNS have not been “spoofed” by anyone with ill intent. As such, Internet-connected systems within the government can verify that the responses are authoritative and have not been altered. Still, the hiccups with implementing DNSSEC convinced Deccio that there was a need for a tool like DNSViz.

DNS, said Deccio, is inherently insecure. Without DNSSEC, tampering by third-party attackers could go undetected, thus redirecting online communications to unwanted destinations. This represents a particularly troublesome problem for .gov addresses owned by government organizations guarding national security information and other vital data.

Deccio believes DNSSEC is of little use if network administrators don’t know how to configure or use it.
He describes DNSViz as a “tool for visualizing the status of a DNS zone.” It provides a visual analysis of the DNSSEC authentication chain for a domain name and its resolution path in the DNS namespace, made available via a Web browser to any Internet user at http://dnsviz.net/. It visually highlights and describes configuration errors detected by the tool to assist administrators in identifying and fixing DNSSEC-related configuration problems.

DNSViz brings together all the components that work together for DNSSEC to function properly into a single graphical representation. The resulting visualization is a collection of configuration data and relationships that are otherwise difficult to assemble, assess and understand.

To help network administrators in their DNSSEC deployment, Sandia’s DNSViz tool functions in two primary ways: It actively analyzes a domain name by performing pertinent DNS lookups and it makes the analysis available via the Web interface. The active analysis occurs periodically to build a history of DNSSEC deployment over time and provide a historical reference for DNS administrators.

Currently, the Web interface is the primary source for viewers to observe data, though Deccio intends to expand DNSViz functionality to allow access via other means. For example, alert mechanisms might be used to inform affected parties, and application programming interfaces (API) can be designed to allow administrators to programmatically access the information instead of manually browsing the DNSViz website.
Deccio has the tool running in the background on Sandia/California’s servers, monitoring a list of some 100,000 DNS names. It performs an analysis a couple times each day and offers a situational awareness of what the DNS configuration for each name looks like from top to bottom.

Though the functionality provided by DNSViz could potentially be included in a marketable software product that’s sold by a for-profit company, Deccio says he envisions it as an open-source tool available to anyone who needs it. With further funding, he hopes to expand the tool so that it can analyze DNS health and security on a continuous basis, essentially creating a full-blown monitoring system that is scalable, versatile and more informational.