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 Situation Tim 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.