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Case Study

Solution: Consolidated storage architecture featuring unified NAS and SAN that includes data mirroring, disk-based backup, and tape storage for complete data protection.

Products: Network Appliance primary and nearline storage devices, StorageTek tape libraries, LEGATO NetWorker software, Fibre Channel switches, Ethernet switches.

Datalink Services: Solution analysis, detailed design, solution implementation, and full solution support.

Industry: Airline Technology

About the Customer
The customer, an airline technology firm, has been providing information systems solutions to airlines for several years. Its customer base consists of more than 40 airlines across the world, including 10 of the world’s 25 largest airlines. If one of its systems were to go down, it could prevent an airline from accessing passenger information, and its business would come to a halt.

The Challenge
The company was utilizing more than 70 terabytes of disk in six data centers and its nightly backups were running about five terabytes. With direct-attached storage on each of its 420 servers, the company was experiencing frequent outages and was not able to meet service level agreements (SLAs) for all applications. Backups were taxing the server and taking a long time to complete. Recovery from tape was time consuming. Additionally, the company’s disaster recovery plan consisted of cloning tapes and storing them off site, a process that was difficult to test and would result in prolonged recovery times in the event of a catastrophe.

With its data nearly doubling every six months over the past two years, the customer wanted a storage environment that was easy to scale and manage. The infrastructure also needed to be highly available as the company faced penalties of up to $20,000 per outage. In addition, the organization was seeking a solution that would offer more complete data recovery protection. To help design and deploy such an architecture, the customer sought a long-term partner. The customer turned to Datalink to help understand the various options that were available.

The Solution
Datalink helped the organization consolidate its storage on several Network Appliance primary storage systems. In particular, Datalink worked with the customer to match its storage to its various application needs, implementing a unified SAN and NAS solution to support a broad range of data and applications from a single, easily managed storage network.

For instance, in the new environment:
• The application servers utilize the iSCSI protocol to connect to the primary storage via an Ethernet connection. Using the iSCSI protocol, the customer implemented a storage area network (SAN) for block-level data, where a Fibre Channel solution was not cost-effective.
• The database, batch and web servers use NFS and CIFS file access protocols to make file-level storage requests in a NAS storage environment.
• The Windows SQL servers, which have more stringent performance requirements, use a Fibre Channel connection to access the primary storage. This Fibre Channel SAN assures storage utilization, higher data availability, reduced management costs, and highly scalable capacity and performance.

The new system is easy to scale in that whenever new storage is required, the IT staff simply needs to add disks to the storage pool. “It has given us the ability to add on new clients and products 50 percent quicker than in the past. We do not have all the administrative work of trying to add new hardware. It is just one storage infrastructure versus the several we had before,” says the customer’s manager of customer support operations.

With this new clustered storage environment, the organization has been able to reach its objective of “five nines” availability. No longer is the whole system impacted by a single server failure. Since the solution was implemented, the customer has achieved 100 percent availability with its databases and has not faced any SLA penalties associated with application downtime. With the direct-attached system, the customer faced losses from penalties of up to a half a million dollars per year.

Fast and Efficient Back Up and Restores
The organization uses NetApp SnapMirror software to mirror data between the systems. The company backs up data to NetApp NearStore disk-based storage devices at two data centers, taking snapshot copies of the data several times a day and sending the copies back to the NearStore devices in just minutes. “We are able to recover data much more quickly now. In fact, it recently took us about 10 seconds to restore a copy of our Oracle database. Previously, this would have taken us up to 24 hours,” said the customer support manager.

The backups also do not tax the servers and network, as did the tape backups that were performed with the former architecture. Previously, overnight backups of two terabytes of data were taking more than 12 hours; the backups now are frequent and non-disruptive.

To round out its data protection strategy, the organization backs up its NearStore systems to StorageTek tape libraries. These backups can be performed at any time without affecting uptime for users.

Strategic Partners
This solution has provided immediate payoffs for the customer. The company has reduced its financial exposure surrounding SLAs and realized much greater efficiencies in managing its storage. The customer credits the expertise of Datalink’s professional services team combined with the broad range of NetApp solutions for giving them confidence that they can meet their long-term challenges as their customers and business evolve.

More: Example Architecture

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