Earth Rangers Increases Storage Capacity and Achieves Award-Winning Energy Efficiency
 
 

Earth Rangers Increases Storage Capacity and Achieves Award-Winning Energy Efficiency

Printer View Printer View

Earth Rangers is an award-winning charitable organization dedicated to educating children about biodiversity loss and empowering them to Bring Back the Wild™.  Building on children’s natural connection to wildlife, Earth Rangers’ focus is to communicate to children a positive science–based message on the importance of protecting biodiversity and adopting more sustainable behaviors. Through programs, including a children’s Web site (earthrangers.com), a permanent studio at the Royal Ontario Museum, and a national Education Outreach Program featuring live animal ambassadors, Earth Rangers is able to reach, inspire, and engage millions of children each year to take action to help ensure the lasting survival of species in Canada.

The content on Earth Rangers’ Web site is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes a year, therefore the organization needed a scalable, high-volume storage solution that it could implement quickly. Further, the organization required an energy-efficient solution that aligned with its over-arching sustainability goals. With Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600, Earth Rangers was able to effectively address these challenges.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Earth Rangers

  • “From a technological standpoint, Oracle’s Pillar Axiom blew all other comparable technologies away. It has the critical functionality we needed in a storage system—including tiered storage, redundancy, and scalability—and it enabled us to meet our budgetary and sustainability goals without sacrificing performance.” – Rob Di Stefano, IT Systems Director, Earth Rangers

  • Replace a legacy storage system with a high-volume, tiered, eco-friendly storage solution capable of storing high-volume content, including videos and pictures, from multiple children’s Web sites promoting conservation
  • Implement a scalable storage solution that can easily support an additional 20 terabytes of educational content each year
  • Complete the storage implementation quickly and ensure that the solution aligns with the organization’s commitment to the environment

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented an energy-efficient Storage Area Network (SAN) environment with Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 storage system, which offers tiered storage, redundancy, and scalability to support the organization’s growing library of educational Web content and other resources
  • Provided eco-friendly storage, supporting and underscoring the organization’s advocacy for being green
  • Used tiered storage functionality to set high, medium, low, and archive tiers, enabling Earth Rangers to allocate critical applications to the “high” tier and assign systems it does not use as often to “low”—preventing systems from running unnecessarily, which minimizes energy use and reduces heat generation  
  • Achieved significant power savings by leveraging Pillar Axiom 600 as a key part of the data center, which runs on six to seven kilowatts of energy and has won two industry awards for energy efficiency
  • Completed the storage system implementation in less than one week, limiting downtime when switching from the legacy system
  • Increased overall productivity and reduced slowdowns and delays with Pillar’s quality of service capabilities, improving ability to retrieve videos, pictures, and other content for the organization’s eco-educational Web sites
  • Reduced maintenance time and costs over legacy storage solution
  • Benefited from the system’s “call home” functionality, which automatically flags problems for an Oracle technician, who in turn, addresses the issue and promptly notifies Earth Rangers when fixed

Why Oracle

“The number one reason we chose Oracle is because its goals and objectives are in line with ours,” said Rob Di Stefano, IT systems director, Earth Rangers. “Oracle is an advocate for being green, and we needed an eco-friendly storage solution. Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 system aligns with our core principles, performs extremely well, and works within our budget.”

Implementation Process

Earth Rangers completed the implementation in 2008, in less than a week.

“From an administrative and technical standpoint, we completed the implementation with ease,: Di Stefano said “The technicians who were here were great and very knowledgeable. I cannot explain how thrilled I was. After the implementation, we ‘set and forget.’ The system is extremely easy to manage.”