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Having an effective method for maintaining and accessing data is a void that many fundraising organizations face on a daily basis. International Data Management (IDMI), in Akron, Ohio, fills that void for their clients with the help of the award-winning Magnitude 3D? 3000e storage area network (SAN) solution from Xiotech Corporation. President Paul Noonan describes IDMI's services: "For more than a decade we have provided full-service database management for religious, political, humanitarian, healthcare, and commercial organizations. We manage contributor data, credit card charges, and fulfillment for entire campaigns." The company also provides its clients with online access to their data. Client data must, therefore, be accessible 24x7? without performance bottlenecks. As the client list grows, so does the demand for flexible, data storage. IDMI used to rely on servers with direct-attached storage, which became increasingly difficult and expensive to manage. "We kept buying more and more servers to keep up with the needs of our clients," says Manager of Information Systems Chris Hatridge. "We needed to find a more efficient way to expand and manage our storage. We looked at storage systems from HP and EMC, but they didn't offer the same virtualization as Xiotech, and their software was much more complex. We also wanted something that was com patible with both Novell NetWare and Microsoft Windows."
For three years, Xiotech's Magnitude? system provided flexible, easy-to-manage storage. But IDMI's storage needs kept growing, and with the Magnitude system nearing capacity, Hatridge was back in the market for a new storage system. This time, he again considered HP and EMC products, but ultimately chose Xiotech's Magnitude 3D 3000 clustered storage system. "For three years, our Magnitude system had 100 percent uptime?that speaks for itself," Hatridge explains. "And we were able to complete data migration to the new system during business hours with no impact to our employees or clients."
Clients Require Maximum Availability
As a growing company with increasing client demands, any downtime means loss of revenue. Magnitude 3D 3000 is designed to dramatically reduce all types of downtime. It includes clustered controllers and drive bays?that can even be separated to protect against local outages. Cross-cluster failover and failback provide added resilience for business continuity. In addition, just about all storage functions can be done online. "Being able to add and reconfigure storage on the fly without downtime to our clients is huge for IDMI," says Hatridge.
Hatridge and his team also are implementing a clustered server architecture for another layer of fault tolerance. "Unlike EMC and HP systems, Magnitude 3D 3000 requires no software on the server. This makes server installations and upgrades much easier," says Hatridge. Booting servers from the SAN also speeds server replacement.&&&&&
He can take a preconfigured replacement server, point it at the failed server's boot volume, and be back up and running in minutes. As vital as nonstop data availability is for IDMI, fast access to that data is equally important. Magnitude 3D 3000 has a significantly faster processor than the Magnitude system and offers cache that Hatridge and his team can turn on or off at the storage volume (virtual disk) level. This means that the 64-bit SQL Server 2005 application that IDMI uses for its databases can take full advantage of cache and the performance boost it provides?without having to share it with applications that really don't need it.
According to Hatridge: "It is impossible to estimate the gains of having zero downtime. Not only for us as a company, but for our clients as well. The Magnitude 3D 3000 system's uptime and faster performance ensure our clients have 24x7 access to their data, which provides a huge ROI (return on investment) for IDMI. "
Cost-Effective Scale for Future Growth
Today, the Magnitude 3D 3000 system at IDMI supports 25 servers and more than 5 terabytes of data, making over 150 million records accessible on a daily basis. IDMI is expecting its data to at least double in the next few years, resulting in the need for additional storage. According to Hatridge: "With the exponential growth of IDMI and our clients, we need storage that we can easily expand. Magnitude 3D 3000 gives us that scalability.
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