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Schoolbank.nl - Equallogic Successstory

SCHOOLBANK.NL MAKES THE GRADE WITH EQUALLOGIC

Schoolbank.nl, a website which allows users to find former classmates and friends, is one of the Netherlands’ largest social networking sites. More than three million people (nearly 20 percent of the entire Dutch population) have registered so that they can relive the glory of their school days. The website shows old class photos and allows people to get in touch with each other again. Rosetta, the company behind Schoolbank.nl, was voted Coolest Company of the Year in a CARP magazine poll and in 2006 Schoolbank.nl came second in the Website of the Year competition, with 65,663 votes (19 percent of the total votes).

Marcel Dumont, Rosetta´s director of operations, is responsible for the technology that keeps Schoolbank.nl up and running. When setting up the site, he chose a standardized infrastructure built with equipment from market-leading vendors, using Microsoft and Dell for the core systems. These systems, consisting of three web servers, two database servers (Microsoft SQL 2000 Server) and a tape library were all hosted and managed by TelecityRedbus, a colocation and hosting company.

A DIFFERENT PICTURE
By July 2006 Schoolbank.nl was seeing ever increasing volumes of images being uploaded to the site, necessitating an urgent storage capacity increase. Dumont explored two alternatives to solve his capacity challenges: continuing in the same vein and purchasing additional hard disks to further expand the direct attached storage (DAS) environment, or uncoupling the storage facilities from the server environment and centralizing them in a separate storage area network (SAN). After analyzing the cost and efficiency of a SAN, the decision not to expand the DAS environment was reached quickly.