Storage virtualization makes deploying storage to servers and applications far easier, particularly for a small staff that includes just two network administrators and two help desk employees, Reisdorff says.

Virtualization allows the formation of "storage pools that can grow and shrink," he says. "One of the biggest problems we have with traditional SANs is when you try to shrink them you really have to destroy and rebuild them."

At New England Law, two SANs in different buildings copy over to each other, helping provide high availability. Other features Reisdorff likes include automatic load balancing and easy-to-use management screens.

The other key vendor for Reisdorff is VMware. New England Law operates 40 or so servers, mostly HP ProLiant machines. Two blade enclosures are filled with server blades operating the VMware Infrastructure 3 hypervisor, with virtualized applications such as Microsoft Exchange, print and application servers and an FTP site.

Certain applications such as streaming video and a voice mail-to-e-mail system remain on physical servers because of heavy CPU needs. But with VMware Reisdorff can run eight to 15 virtual machines on a physical box.

VMotion live migration helps provide high availability by moving VMs from one physical box to another with no downtime. Advanced storage features also help ensure high uptime.

"The EVA has all the RAID built in, so if there's a bad drive it will move the information off to different drives so you can replace it without any downtime," Reisdorff says. "All these blades have these virtual machines floating on them. If one blade fails it will move that virtual machine to another blade without it going down. Or if one server is [demanding] a lot of extra resources ... the infrastructure will give it more memory, more CPU and spread [tasks] out over the other blades so it can still process without bogging down or crashing."

In case of a catastrophe affecting both server rooms, New England Law is considering options for purchasing disaster-recovery services from an external data center provider, but has not yet finalized those plans.

New England Law's annual IT budget is about $1.8 million, and the virtualization, SAN and blade server project cost about $250,000 the first year and $110,000 the second year. But in the long run Reisdorff expects the project to reduce IT costs in addition to providing students and professors better services. The college plans to move its data center in 2011, and having virtual servers and live migration will make that move easier and less costly, he says.