 Storage That Grows With Student Needs
LaGrange Highlands School District 106, is located 20 miles west of Chicago. It educates 900 students in pre-school through 8th grade. Technology Director Eric Callis manages a network of seven Netware servers for proxy, e-mail, print and file services and five Macintosh servers for application, web and database services. Students use 27 iMac computers distributed in four computer labs.
Multimedia has become an increasingly important part of the education process at La Grange. Multimedia presentations that are part of the students’ schoolwork generate a large volume of data.
Eric has an Apple Xsan which was used to provide data storage for teachers and students. The SAN is an expensive storage solution and Eric saw an opportunity to use Drobo to provide easy-to-manage storage whose capacity can be expanded simply as the storage demands of students change over time.
 Initially, DroboShare provided storage for backup purposes. Eric uses a utility called Folder Synchronize to back up important data onto the DroboShare. It worked perfectly for this purpose, and he began exploring other ways to use it.
He now uses DroboShare as storage for a video production class of 30 students. Students are able to archive their projects on the DroboShare and load video files onto their iMac for editing. The DroboShare makes it very easy for students to collaborate on their video projects.
 Multimedia Driving Storage Growth
Eric benefits from Drobo’s ability to protect the school’s data from a drive failure without requiring the maintenance of a traditional RAID solution. He commented, “DroboShare lets you throw a Drobo on the network. Installation is extremely simple. You just connect a Drobo to the DroboShare, and connect it to the network. When you look at ‘price per piece of mind’ DroboShare provides great value.”
Eric continued, “DroboShare makes it easy to provide a large data store for student projects that normally would take space and bandwidth on my expensive SAN.”
Drobo Ideal for Schools With Minimal IT Support
Eric recommends the Drobo to school districts to simplify their IT support tasks. “It’s a wonderful way to provide storage for schools. You can use a DroboShare to provide storage for a student when they first enter a school district and keep that storage available until the student graduates. When compared with the alternatives, DroboShare provides a very cost-effective way to do this.”
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