Case Study: Earth Rangers Builds a Green Future

Founded in 1999, Earth Rangers is a Canadian non-profit organization that focuses on encouraging children to have a positive impact on the environment. Inspiring the public and corporate leaders with its innovative, LEED Gold headquarters, the Earth Rangers Center is one of the most energy-efficient buildings of its kind and implements leading-edge technologies that not only keep costs down, but also conserve resources and support the Earth Rangers' philosophy of sustainability. While continuing toward the goal of zero net energy, Earth Rangers plans to develop interactive exhibits where the public can tour the facility and learn how to incorporate sustainability into their companies and lives.

Challenge

Prior to the development of its online community aimed towards earth-friendly kids, Earth Rangers' storage needs were met by a variety of NAS devices. However, when development on the online community began, the staff doubled and the organization knew that storage would be a major concern. Adding more NAS devices to the servers meant using more energy, and Earth Rangers began looking for an alternative that would support their growth plans as well as their green goals.

"We anticipated that our capacity and processing needs would grow substantially with the Earth Rangers online community in production," said Peter Kendall, executive director at Earth Rangers. "We needed a system that would use as little power as possible while giving us the performance we need - and at the same time would be scalable and expandable."

In addition to the online community, Earth Rangers plans to develop exhibits at its corporate headquarters to showcase sustainable technologies and demonstrate the innovations used to maximize energy use. Earth Rangers' energy usage is reduced by about 20 percent per year, but since this is the result of multiple efforts executed at the same time, it has been difficult to point to specific causes and effects.

"We are putting additional monitoring and metrics systems into place, and with more metrics comes the need for more storage," said Kendall. "This will create a huge number of data points so we can more closely and accurately monitor our energy savings and demonstrate the benefits of sustainable technologies."

Solution

With VMware, Earth Rangers has been able to create a virtual infrastructure consisting of data storage from Pillar, and Dell's processing servers and thin clients using VDI. The organization is also using FalconStor's data deduplication software to sync data between sites for instantaneous data backup recovery and disaster recovery. In order to save money on long distance calls, Earth Rangers is using Nortel's POE switches for VOIP and networking as well as implementing Nortel VPN so that employees can work remotely thus reducing car emissions.

Expandability, scalability, and smooth integration with VMware were important considerations, but energy efficiency was the main prerequisite as Earth Rangers searched for its ideal storage solution, as it had to align with the company's philosophy of sustainability.

After researching multiple vendors, Earth Rangers learned that Pillar Data Systems was the most efficient. Pillar is an industry leader in energy efficiency, and even designed an industry benchmark for evaluating storage efficiencies called the Efficiency Quotient (EQ), which takes into account energy and physical savings, cooling requirements, and even capacity and performance.