Celeros
Case Study
Data Protection. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.
LSI, Seagate and Celeros combine to enable protection for student records at The Graduate School at
The Virginia Institute of Technology.
Data, and the information it contains, is the foundation upon which knowledge is built, knowledge that improves lives and makes the
modern world possible, knowledge that is painstakingly developed by individuals at leading institutions around the world, institutions
like The Virginia Institute of Technology, also known as Virginia Tech.
To accumulate the data, the information, the knowledge needed to make the world a better place is a privilege and responsibility to be
taken very seriously. To protect same is, in many cases, required by law.
“The risk of storing data on servers
without hardware-based encryption is too great, the potential
costs too high. Seagate is pleased
to be providing Constellation ES
SEDs with powerful governmentgrade security to lock down student information on Virginia Tech
servers while meeting the school’s
requirements for high-capacity
storage.”
Henry Fabian
Seagate Executive Director of Product
Marketing
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy
Act* (FERPA) is a federal law that protects the
privacy of student education records. The law
applies to all schools that receive funds under
an applicable program of the U.S. Department
of Education, including The Graduate School at
Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Jeremy Sippel, IT director for the Virginia Tech
Graduate School, was tasked with responsibility to implement the university’s policy based
on state and federal regulations that flow from
FERPA.
“Our most significant storage issue related to
the emerging need, and ultimately, requirement
for encryption of data,” Sippel explained. “With
data loss being reported at an ever increasing
rate, to manage the liability of data exposure
not to mention the potential negative impact
on those whose data is exposed, our department needed to identify every possible avenue
to ensure data is stored and communicated in a
secure manner.”
“Due to the federal and state regulations we are
bound by, encryption is effectively a requirement. University policy, in fact, does explicitly
require the encryption of sensitive data at rest.
So as a standard business practice here at The
Graduate School, we anticipate that any future
storage procurement will require built in encryption,” he continued.
“Having established a multi-layer protection
scheme for data in motion,” Sippel said recently,
“we had more of a challenge for data at rest.
We implemented the usual array of firewall,
virus protection and IPsec measures necessary
to meet our obligations as they relate to data
on our networks, but we were having trouble
finding a solution we felt would be effective for
protecting data at rest.”
“After looking at a number of alternative
software solutions for encrypting shared data
at rest, we felt that the choices available had
not matured to the point of providing sufficiently transparent encryption methods,” Sippel
concluded.
The Graduate School at Virginia Tech looked at
a number of potential solutions for encrypting
data at rest, and settled on the recommendation
of their technology partners at Celeros to evaluate and to implement disk based encryption
technologies from Seagate with key management from LSI.
“Over the years Celeros has
emerged as a vendor providing a
feature rich and reliable platform
acceptable for small scale implementations, yet enterprise in quality and support.
Celeros, leveraging LSI and
Seagate technologies, provided
a solution which allowed our
department to deliver a cost effective solution for reliable data
storage and encryption, with options for future growth that don’t
require wholesale replacement
of any equipment. This solution
purports to provide a long life allowing growth along the way.”
Jeremy Sippel, Director, IT,
The Graduate School, Virginia Institute of
Technology
The combination of disk based encryption
on Seagate’s Constellation® ES Self-Encrypted
Drives (SEDs) and SafeStore™ key management
from LSI, running on the LSI® MegaRAID® SAS
9280-4i4e controller card, gave Sippel several
features he felt were ‘must haves’ in Virginia
Tech’s decision process: The solution was not application dependent. Sippel didn’t have to worry
about administering rights and privileges for users as they moved around the globe. Sippel also
wanted to avoid the performance overhead he
thought a software-based solution might entail.
Jeremy went on to explain, “The data we
consume does not allow a practical method to
isolate sensitive versus not. We are unable to
predict the schedule for consumption of our
services, and many of them are public facing,
not allowing for a scheduled state of offline.
Based on our assessment of the solutions currently available we felt, the only viable alternative, currently, is drive based encryption.
“The basic concern we address with this method
is loss of a drive through theft or mistake. While
our current drive disposal practices utilize a
secure multi-rewrite of random data across
the drive, the concept that the only data being
written to the drives is encrypted provides an
additional layer of reassurance that data will not
be exposed.”
In addition to the very specific encryption requirements, the Information Technology group
supporting The Graduate School under Sippel
was tasked to support the general requirements that many production data centers have
to manage including exponential data growth,
rack density and the related HVAC issues, system
and network reliability, performance, and availability.
“Snapshots and replication were important
features on our requirements list, not typically
found in lower cost solutions,” according to Sippel. “Celeros provides those as standard features
in the platform they recommended to us. Our
need for replication was viewed as a better fit
for us to generate online backup and archives
than the traditional disk-to-disk-to-tape solutions, and snapshots provided us quick recovery
from user error in file management.”
“Celeros, with LSI based key management and
Seagate SEDs, has provided a transparent solution for our encryption needs. Implementation
was well documented, and achieved within half
an hour including hardware installation and
we don’t seem to be suffering a performance
penalty, either.
“We have compared gross throughput between
a unit with encryption implemented and one
without. We found the hardware based encryption provided equivalent throughput numbers
with the unit that did not have encryption
implemented.
“An ancillary concern was the management
interface. Given cost issues, we were willing to
sacrifice ease of configuration but we didn’t
have to. Calling on our experience with a wide
range of management interfaces and the excellent in-line User Interface (UI) documentation
we found we were able to find our way through
the interface and configure the devices quickly
and easily,” Sippel concluded.
The Challenge
The Graduate School at Virginia Tech needed to add storage and storage management
capabilities much like any organization grappling with data growth that some analysts put as
high as 50% - 60% annually. In addition, the Graduate School is required by federal and state
regulations and university policy to take steps to protect student records while the data is in
flight and while at rest.
The Solution
Jeremy Sippel, Director of IT Services for the Graduate School at Virginia Tech developed a plan
to protect data in motion and explored various technologies for encryption of data at rest,
finally settling on a combination of LSI encryption key management and on-disk encryption
capabilities offered by Seagate, in a recommended, integrated and supported platform
provided by LSI channel reseller partner Celeros.
The Result
According to Sippel, the systems provided by Celeros offer all the data protection and
management features of a branded solution from a top tier vendor, without the high cost.
Support for data growth, snapshot, replication, and encryption were all incorporated and
supported by Celeros using technologies from LSI and Seagate.
Celeros Case Study 2
Product Overviews
“We are fortunate to work with
LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-4i4e
a very sophisticated client like
Four Port Internal/Four Port External 6Gb/s PCI Express SATA+SAS RAID Controller
Jeremy and The Graduate School
MegaRAID SATA+SAS controllers provide a new level of reliability, availability and performance to
businesses that are facing storage challenges driven by unprecedented data growth. The MegaRAID
SAS 9280-4i4e controller, with four internal and four external ports, supports both internal drive
storage and external JBOD expansion. Using the external SAS ports, multiple JBODs can be connected to a server, providing a scalable and affordable solution for growing storage requirements.
at Virginia Tech. They did their
homework and brought a demanding, but well thought out set
of requirements to us for managing and protecting vital student
records. With the technology available from leading suppliers like
LSI and Seagate, we were able to
meet their needs by offering our
LSI MegaRAID SafeStore Software
Whether it is sensitive customer information, intellectual property or proprietary data that helps a
company reach its strategic objectives, a company’s data may be its most valuable asset. If this data
is misplaced or stolen, organizations run the risk of lost revenue, legal implications, and a tarnished
reputation. The unfortunate truth is that an organization’s data is becoming increasingly vulnerable
as lost, accidentally exposed or breached data is becoming more and more commonplace in today’s
environment. With data security risks on the rise, an influx of government mandates and regulations
for securing data have been implemented and are becoming part of the corporate landscape for
many. Eliminating the exposure of private data now simply viewed as a sound business practice.
XD100S platform populated with
Seagate® Constellation® ES Self-Encrypting Drives
the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-4i4e
The Seagate Constellation ES drive is the perfect 3.5-inch hard drive for demanding business environments that require highly reliable and efficient high capacity storage with seamless enterprise
integration. Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) and FIPS 140-2 Validated™ SED security options available to
help you protect your data-at-rest and be government compliant.
controller, LSI SafeStore software,
and Seagate Constellation ES
SEDs.”
Hossein Alaee
CEO at Celeros
Seagate Constellation ES fifth-generation drives lead the industry with a range of high capacity
enterprise drive options. Available in both 6Gb/s SAS and SATA interfaces, these drives feature
enterprise-class reliability with the power and performance efficiencies that make them ideal for
capacity-optimized, 24x7 multi-drive server and storage environments.
Celeros XD100S Platform Model X100S
EzSANFiler XD Series from Celeros is the fusion of
best of breed EzSAN XL Series and EzNAS XN Series functionality in an integrated, all-in-one system that allows you to centralize and consolidate
your storage in one platform and use the same
storage pool to provide block level storage to
databases, email servers,… as well as file sharing
services within the same platform. It eliminates
multiple platform requirements, enables a more
efficient use of storage space, eases the management and administrative burdens, and thus leads
to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
EzSANFiler XD Series not only supports iSCSI SAN
natively, it is also capable of supporting Fibre
Channel SAN functionality and a variety of Network File Services such as Microsoft CIFS (SMB),
NFS (Linux, Unix, MacOSX), AppleTalk, FTP and
SecureFTP in a single appliance.
XD series is one truly unified storage appliance
that brings together cutting edge SAS, SATA,
SAN, NAS, and Backup technologies in one single
system offering unprecedented ease of manage-
C E L E R O S X D 1 0 0 S P L AT F O R M
MODEL X100S
Chassis
1U (1.7”)
Drives
4 x 3.5” Seagate
Constellation ES Drives
ST2000NM0021
Capacity
8TB (4 x 2TB)
Processor
Pentium Dual Core
Cache
2GB
Network
2 x 1GbE
RAID
0,1,5, 6, 10, 50, 60
Expansion
Wide SAS Expander Module
Power Supplies
280W AC Power Supplies
w/ PFC
450W (1+1) redundant PS
Optional
Cooling
4 x 40 mm redundant fans
Temperature
10deg – 35deg C ( 50deg –
95deg F)
Humidity
8% - 90% non-condensing
Dimensions
W 17.2” x D19.8” x H1.7”
Indicators
Power, Network, HDD LEDs
Celeros Case Study 3
ment and administration. Administrators can use the intuitive XD Series web based interface to create a Fibre Channel SAN volume for high-speed video
editing, and use the same interface to allocate an iSCSI volume for their Exchange servers or SQL Database. Same simple GUI interface can then be used
to allocate a NAS volume, create a share folder and make it available to Windows or Linux users.
About LSI Partners
Celeros Corp. is the leading provider of full featured, high performance, low cost iSCSI based IP storage area network (SAN), Network Attached Storage
(NAS) and SANFiler (SAN & NAS combined) appliances that empower the small and medium sized enterprises with the benefits of consolidation and centralization of storage assets while leveraging their IP infrastructure and inter-networking expertise. Celeros solutions are designed for ease of management and administration and set up in minutes. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. For more information please visit
www.celeros.com
Seagate®, a long-standing LSI technology partner, drives innovative enterprise-class storage solutions. First to market with 6Gbps SAS hard drives, we
offer the peace-of-mind that results from deploying solutions that enhance business continuity. Seagate’s Savvio® and Constellation hard drives optimize
performance, reliability, capacity, availability and security. Customers look to our OEMs and system builders to boost efficiencies, minimize complexity while reducing costs and administrative overhead by leveraging best-in-breed technological advances including SFF (small form factor), SAS (serial
attached SCSI) and SED (Self-Encrypting Drives). Seagate delivers optimized, robust enterprise hard drives where choice, security and simplicity provide
businesses with a sustainable storage strategy. For more information, visit http://www.seagate.com/
Dedicated to its motto, Ut Prosim (That I May Serve), Virginia Tech takes a hands-on, engaging approach to education, preparing scholars to be leaders
in their fields and communities. As the Commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and its leading research institution, Virginia Tech offers 215 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 30,000 students and manages a research portfolio of nearly $400 million. The university fulfills
its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally,
regionally, and across Virginia.
The Graduate School is responsible for the development, administration, and evaluation of graduate education throughout the University. Graduate
School personnel work in partnership with the faculty, program chairs and department heads, the deans, graduate students (particularly through the
Graduate Student Association), and the Commission on Graduate Studies & Policies (CGS&P) to further Graduate education at Virginia Tech. To learn more
about the University, visit http://www.vt.edu/ . More information on The Graduate School at Virginia Tech can be found at http://graduateschool.vt.edu/.
Build Today
You can use the same LSI RAID technology as Celeros and The Graduate School at Virginia Tech for your high performance requirements today. Contact
David Graas at [email protected] for more information.
For more information and sales office locations, please visit the LSI web sites at: lsi.com lsi.com/channel
LSI, LSI and Design logo, MegaRAID, SafeStore and CacheCade are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation. All other brand and
product names may be trademarks of their respective companies.
LSI Corporation reserves the right to make changes to any products and services herein at any time without notice. LSI does not assume any
responsibility or liability arising out of the application or use of any product or service described herein, except as expressly agreed to in writing
by LSI; nor does the purchase, lease, or use of a product or service from LSI convey a license under any patent rights, copyrights, trademark rights,
or any other of the intellectual property rights of LSI or of third parties.
Copyright ©2011 by LSI Corporation. All rights reserved.
August 2011
*(FERPA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99)