Jason Bane, vice president of infrastructure operations at the Virginia Credit Unit, deployed a variety of NetApp filers to deduplicate his data and to replicate it from a Midlothian-based data center to headquarters in Richmond, Va., 10 miles away.
Bane deployed two FAS 6070 arrays with 90TB of total capacity in Midlothian and two FAS 3020 arrays (with 50TB total capacity) in Richmond to replace an EMC Symmetrix that didn't perform well and was expensive. (The Symmetrix remains in the Midlothian data center to support mainframe-tier applications.)

The NetApp filers host primarily the credit union's Microsoft SQL Server. And Bane, has attached 160 physical HP DL380 and blade servers – 160 of which are virtualized – to the filers.

Virtualization was one of the challenges for Bane when he took over the NetApp installation. His virtualized servers normally host 10 to 12 virtual machines; some servers have been partitioned into as many as 20 to 30 virtual machines. Bane's team started by building out their VMDK templates and storing them on the NetApp filers. They also boot servers from the filers.
Relying on two DS-3 lines between Midlotian and Richmond, Bane uses two DS-3 lines and NetApp's SnapMirror snapshot technology to asynchronously mirror data between locations. Applications that have a less-critical RPO are snapped every four hours; those that are deemed more business-critical are snapped on the hour.

Since deploying NetApp's A-SIS deduplication, Bane has seen a 300% to 400% reduction in the amount of data he replicates.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.