Chris Hansen is a systems manager at Gordon College, a title that involves managing the storage, replication and backup and recovery –as well some application level processes- across three different facilities. Gordon has been a Compellent  for about 6 years and Hansen, who’s been around for four, believes that was a very good decision. He talked this over in theCube with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman during Day 2 of the Dell Storage Forum.

Hansen elaborated on his university’s infrastructure. Gordon used to run 100 physical boxes until he virtualized them, and traded off all that for 8 servers and 100 VMs. The main data center has a capacity of 25 terabytes, the secondary site has 15 terabytes and third can hold up to 10TBs of data.

It’s set up so that the data stored in the site is asynchronously replicated to the secondary, which is just like the first is a VMware-powered Compellent cluster. The main center copies data to the third deployment using CommVault.

Henson emphasized how important integration and the ability of departments to cooperate with each other are for use cases such as Gordon’s, and that Dell is helping to facilitate At Storage Forum 2012, which Vellante observed as more polished than last year’s, this convergence is coming  more from the direction of the latter rather than just Compellent itself.

Another area that is addressed in the interview is the end point boom, and specifically the way it pertains to the macadamia. Gordon is dedicating a lot of network resources to be able to support students’ phones, laptops and other devices, while also staying sufficiently cautious. Its systems manager pointed at a number of security policies that are implemented to prevent potentially wide-spread security risks: each device is scanned for malicious software before receiving access.