Four executives offer tips

As these IT executives relate, new technologies need new best practices.

By Ann Bednarz, Network World
February 20, 2006 12:04 AM ET

. What's this?

Cliff Dutton

CTO and executive vice president, Ibis Consulting

Thinking outside the box

Before rolling out Acopia Networks' storage virtualization switches, Ibis Consulting stored the millions of files related to each client matter in a single physical location. The electronic data-discovery company had no choice, since spreading them out among multiple storage devices would have created a mapping nightmare for the applications that query the content.

But keeping them together meant living with performance limitations. "Because we're processing a significant amount of data, with a very large number of servers, if we pointed a significant number of those servers at one shelf, it's possible that at the spindle level - the individual disk level - we could have faced I/O bottlenecks," Dutton says.

The Acopia switches now let Ibis distribute file loads across its 200-TB storage environment, improving throughput, Dutton says. The technology also lets the firm automatically reallocate shares as projects grow, instead of having to manually reallocate shares. "With virtualization, the switch takes care of the physical mapping of where the files are. There's one logical pathname, so the application only needs to know about one path name."