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Capturing, storing, and analyzing ever-greater amounts of information are all at the core of SARCOM’s business. Therefore, the company needed to transform its IT infrastructure and establish responsive, manageable, and easy-to-provision data storage. The firm was unable to effectively manage data with the EMC CLARiiON 600 array as their business grew. In addition to drive failures, the array could no longer meet SARCOM’s requirements for capacity, backups, point-in-time copies, or database management.
Most critically, says Todd Crites, SARCOM CIO, “The CLARiiON was never able to fully replicate our data and make infallible copies. We didn’t even look at replacing it with another EMC system.”
The advantages of virtualization
Searching for a better solution, SARCOM management took a long, hard look at the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA). They visited the HP Storage Solution Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado several times to listen to briefings and see the arrays in action.
“Our experience with the Storage Solution Center was very positive,” says SARCOM’s Senior VP of Product Solutions Dan Schneider. “You learn about more than the HP storage portfolio; you learn how HP approaches the whole enterprise-computing framework.”
SARCOM managers were especially impressed by the way HP simplified virtualization – the ability to pool and share compute and storage resources for faster response with less overhead costs. Using HP StorageWorks Command View EVA software, for example, the SARCOM staff could allocate storage resources to meet demand in real time.
“In the EVA, HP proposed a much cleaner, less complex way of handling storage allocation with one virtual LUN (storage logical unit), as opposed to the EMC CLARiiON, which takes a certain amount of configuration,” says Crites. “On the CLARiiON, we had to build multiple RAID groups or mirrors and then present the middle LUNs to the hosts. The HP EVA saves time in reconfiguring storage. That’s important because we’re always creating storage LUNs for testing or other reasons.”
Combined with virtualization features is the array’s ability to take point-in-time copies or snapclones of an entire data set for backup _ a process SARCOM couldn’t fully achieve until now. Recalls Crites, “When we tried to take point-in-time copies on our other array, the images would fade through, and we couldn’t be sure of making a recoverable image.” Equally important, with the HP solution SARCOM does not have to pay “service fees” to make changes or add drives to its new array.
Quick deployment
HP Services installed the new SAN quickly. “The HP engineers came out for about a day, set up the arrays, and then we attached servers to them,” says Crites. SARCOM uses a 14 TB EVA for its primary production environment and a smaller 4 TB EVA for disaster recovery and backup – in conjunction with HP Data Protector Software, which backs up data to two HP StorageWorks 4400 Tape Libraries. These HP business continuity, availability, and disaster recovery solutions are designed to promote resilient operations – and help SARCOM recover its critical data in the event of an unexpected outage.
For example, Data Protector fosters continuity of internal business operations with automated data backup and recovery, as well as scalability to support multiple servers. “HP Data Protector Software is comprehensive and easy-to-use for recovering data and backing up our important Progress ERP database,” says Crites.
On the back end, the SAN stores data generated by SARCOM’s Progress Software enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and 70 GB Progress database, which both run on HP servers under the HP-UX 11i operating system. On the front end, the HP SAN supports Web applications, reporting database warehouses built on Microsoft® SQL Server 2005, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 e-mail and messaging services, all running on HP servers.
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