Plunging into virtualization

Bill Manning knew he had a problem keeping up with the storage demands of his network. Manning, associate director of technical services for the Plumbers & Pipefitters National Pension Fund, wanted to expand storage without facing the challenges associated with traditional RAID migrations. He accomplished that by rolling out virtualization software from DataCore that groups all of his storage into a common pool that can be managed from a single console.

Manning administers more than 1.5 terabytes of employment, retirement, pension, financial and eligibility data for 250,000 members of the $4.5 billion fund in Alexandria, Va. The organization's storage needs have quadrupled during the past four years because of a conversion of paper documents to digital images. Each time Manning expanded his storage, he had to do it with identically sized disk drives. If he had 9G-byte drives installed, he'd have to find 9G-byte drives even though the industry had moved on to 18G-, 36G- and 72G-byte drives.

"Every 15 to 18 months I was going to be rebuilding RAID arrays, which was an expensive and time-consuming process that caused downtime," Manning says. "As the volumes of data become larger, the time to restore them from tape will get proportionately longer. At some time we would be faced with having the company down for four to five days."

He anticipated even greater storage manageability headaches when the fund began moving more paper files to digital format. What's more, two of his Windows NT servers were running out of space, while two other servers only utilized 50% of their disk space.

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Every byte into the pool
Visions of virtualization
Adding storage where needed

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Realizing he could save more than $300,000 by not having to rebuild the two overcrowded RAID arrays, Manning put a stop to buying RAID in a willy-nilly fashion. About a year and a half ago, he implemented a storage-area network (SAN) using Gadzoox Capellix Fibre Channel switches and DataCore SANsymphony virtualization software.

The rollout cost $500,000, but saves time and trouble whenever IT needs to expand storage. "I can buy whatever disk is available and reconfigure the array on the SAN without taking the network down," he says.

Manning uses SANsymphony to dynamically allocate the pool of storage wherever it's needed. He monitors and administers the virtualization process from a single Web-based console, greatly reducing the complexity of managing his network. This also allows his staff to spend more time addressing other problems.

Installed on industry-standard Intel servers called Storage Domain Servers, SANsymphony supports Windows NT/2000, Unix, NetWare, Macintosh and Linux operating systems. The fund has two mirrored Storage Domain Servers for fault-tolerance. If one fails, the other takes over.

IT also has set thresholds that warn staff when data capacity reaches 60% utilization. When a threshold is exceeded, SANsymphony sends an e-mail warning or pager message to IT workers so they can plan and budget for more disk drives. "By virtualizing the storage space,

I can better plan now how storage will affect my budget operations because I can see how that space is going to be used," Manning says.

When new disks arrive, IT plugs them into the cabinets, and formats and initializes them. The DataCore software recognizes the additional space and queries the administrator on how the space should be apportioned. Manning's group normally adds space over the weekend when it won't disrupt the workflow.

"[SANsymphony] lets us drag and drop storage from one server to another," Manning says. "It makes moving storage really easy."

Assisted by Selenetix, a systems integrator and reseller, Manning set out to deploy a SAN and virtualization software over a weekend. Accustomed to week-long upgrades to the RAID system, Manning was surprised that everything went as smoothly as it did. Users see data no differently than before.

Next up on Manning's to-do list are to increase fault-tolerance on the SAN and integrate two Solaris servers that are used for management and fund-tracking applications. These servers will add as much as 600G bytes of data to the SAN.

Plumbers & Pipefitters Pension Fund is also taking advantage of SANsymphony's snapshot back-up capability. "We are moving to a disk-to-disk backup, in which we use snapshots to back up to another disk in real time and then to tape from the second copy," Manning says. "The integration of features such as mirroring and [snapshot backup] are extremely important to us."

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Contact Senior Editor Deni Connor

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