Baking company finds ease of use with NetApp
Talk to Brendan O’Malley, vice president and CIO for Tasty Baking in Philadelphia and he will tell you that all he wants is storage that is easy to manage.
O’Malley bought two clustered NetApp FAS 3020 storage arrays which he vaults and mirrors data to a remote FAS 3020 for disaster recovery. Most of his decision to buy NetApp boxes focused on the ease of management – all the software such as snapshot, SnapMirror and SnapVault are managed from similar interface – and make day-to-day management of the NetApp systems easier for this IT-constrained organization.
“We had a SAN from another manufacturer, but needed a system that we could consolidate our storage and make it easier to manage,” says O’Malley. “We were struggling to manage and having decentralized storage, it was a huge challenge. The discussions we had with manufacturers were more focused on the cache on the box, its microsecond performance and very engineering based.”
p”NetApp understood what we wanted – we talked about what applications were running, how we refreshed our SAP instances and the business challenges we were facing. That sold us on NetApp,” says O’Malley.
His NetApp boxes have 20TB of capacity. O’Malley uses the NetApp A-SIS deduplication and it has saved him space. “With our other storage technology, we had a solution for every problem. We had one package to do replication, one for deduplication, all these different software packages running on the SAN.”
With NetApp, O’Malley says he has a deeper set of tools – all from NetApp – to rely on when he needs them. “Have one manufacturer to turn to is perfect for us,” says O’Malley. “Because we have a small IT staff, we’ve focused on one operating system, one database, one virtualization solution and one storage technology.”
O’Malley also tiers his storage. The most business-critical database data is stored on Fibre Channel drives and less mission-critical data on the NetApp Serial ATA drives. He has 12 physical servers attached to the NetApp boxes – the physical servers are partitioned into a total of 70 virtual servers using VMware. O’Malley and his IT staff store the VMware VMDK images on the NetApp SAN and remotely boot the servers from it.
He is looking at iSCSI right now – and if he decides to implement it – he knows right where he’ll go.
