Case Study

Penn Foster is a nationally accredited education program, currently headquartered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with additional office locations in Mason, Ohio. As the world’s leader in at-home education, Penn Foster has maintained a tradition of excellence for more than 100 years. In its first decade, during the late 19th century, the school enrolled more than a quarter of a million students. By 1945, five million students had enrolled in Penn Foster training programs, and as of today, that number has grown to more than 13 million. When Penn Foster went looking for a faster, more cost-effective, on-site archiving solution for all its student records, it instituted the Imation InfiniVault Active Archive Storage Appliance.

The SituationTim Condon, Manager of IT Services, administers the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the IBM AS/400 and the telecomm systems at Penn Foster. With the number of students in the millions, and a self-imposed retention period of 30 years for all student records, Penn Foster was experiencing ever-increasing data growth and data retention challenges.

Beyond keeping records of student contracts and enrollments, the school needed to retain information that tracked each student’s progress within specific classes and within the degree program. As data growth increased and the optical system aged, Penn Foster needed to establish a cost-effective solution to maintain and archive all its student records.

The Challenge For its data storage needs, Penn Foster utilized a Storage Area Network (SAN) and ran a Real Vision Imaging (RVI) archiving system on its AS/400. Data was backed up to a Plasmon optical platter device, which was problematic. “As we started to relay data, the Plasmon was slow, it took a while to load, and it had mechanical problems. It’s a mechanical device so a physical arm has to move platters,” explained Condon. Additionally, Penn Foster had no real redundancy of its data, other than the optical platters themselves, and there was the fear that if anything happened to the operations center the data would be lost. Penn Foster needed an on-site archiving solution, more redundancy, and a disaster recovery plan.

Penn Foster Institutes Imation InfiniVault™ Active Archive Storage Appliance to Archive Student Records

AT-A-GLANCE

Industry:Higher Education

Application: Data Retention and Retrieval

Policy Management

Optical Replacement

Disaster Recovery

Software: Real Vision Imaging (RVI)

Benefits Realized: Scalable data retention and quick retrieval of student records.

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The SolutionPenn Foster migrated its data off the Plasmon optical system and installed the Imation InfiniVault in both its headquarters and data center. The school continued to use RVI software on the AS/400 to manage the movement of data between the primary storage and the InfiniVault. Now all the data is properly archived and replicated between the two InfiniVaults, providing an easy solution for disaster recovery.

Condon especially appreciates the ease of expandability of the InfiniVault. “You just plug it in and add cartridges as you need to expand,” he explains. “We don’t have to fool with optical platters and the access times are considerably less than they were with the Plasmon.”

For the archival of student records, Condon takes advantage of the InfiniVault’s encryption and Write Once Read Many (WORM) capabilities included with the InfiniVault software, making it easy for Penn Foster to confidently adhere to its policy management rule of a 30 year retention period for all student data archives. According to Condon, “Imation InfiniVault has definitely helped us manage our archive documents. It helped us put some rules around them and has great flexibility from inside the infrastructure.”

Using the InfiniVault for both retention and retrieval of archived data, the only issue Condon has is managing all the people who want to use it. “Everybody in the world wants to get on it. We’ve got to beat people off it,” he says. Since the data replication feature is especially appealing to other departments, there is now a high demand to take advantage of the InfiniVault’s versatility.

For Penn Foster, the Imation InfiniVault modernized its aging optical storage infrastructure. By providing an easy-to-use archive solution with effortless expansion capabilities, the school is now able to more effectively manage its ever-increasing database of student records.

Questions? Contact us at:Phone: 651-704-7777Website: www.scalablestorage.com

“ Imation InfiniVault has definitely helped us manage our archive documents. It helped us put some rules around them and has great flexibility from inside the infrastructure.

”—Tim Condon

Manager of IT Services, Penn Foster