City of Fairfax, VA
StorTrends Targets the Need for Data Replication and "Active Storage"
To help address the data storage and management needs of a medium-sized city government in the northern Virginia / metro Washington D.C. area, the StorTrends Sales Team from AMI faced several challenges. Drawing on years of experience in designing enterprise-class storage solutions, AMI stepped in and proposed a robust solution that not only would meet the immediate data storage needs of the City, but would also have the capacity and flexibility to grow with future demand over the coming years.
 10 out of 10 
- Data Center Manager, City of Fairfax,VA
Storage and IT Environment Background:
The subject of this case study is a local city government in the busy metro Washington D.C. region, providing access to IT resources from more than 12 geographic sites and from any remote Internet browser for authorized employees. The City has more than 30 servers. With some overlap in purpose and some multipurpose servers, approximately eight are application, and 20 or more host databases. The remaining servers are dedicated to special purposes.
The City also has at least three total general file servers, but at the time they were approached by AMI, had already begun supplementing the main file server with stolen capacity on other servers. AMI StorTrends Sales Staff consulted with the City on the need to modify this arrangement, as this could expose this "split" data to vulnerabilities, data anomalies, and the like. Only the main file server, and its stolen chunks of storage on other servers, were the focus of this storage project, specifically to regroup this misappropriated capacity. One terabyte of the primary 3U StorTrends appliance has been allocated for this purpose; files are currently occupying approximately 28% of the one terabyte (286GB).
Prior to StorTrends, the City utilized built-in/integrated server storage only. They are using Gigabit switches, and the environment is nearly all Microsoft, with a couple of Apple systems present as well. The time frame for deployment was not quantified by calendar days, but by the pace of data growth itself. As expected, AMI and its StorTrends solution had no problems meeting this goal. Moreover, the AMI solution met the City's approved budget amount, something that can sometimes be a challenge when working with smaller municipalities.
Key needs to Meet:
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Challenge
The City's IT Department needed to give users more active storage capacity for their documents
created daily with their office suite. The goal was to provide storage that could be expanded
or moved, without regard to the file server's physical hardware limitations and with minimal
interruption to the users' access. In the words of the IT Manager, "I wanted our users' Microsoft shares
and drive mappings to move to the new storage solution, without any changes to the UNC paths,
and I wanted a solution that could be grown."
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Solution
AMI's Thin Provisioning feature allows users to configure "virtual" storage capacity beyond existing
physical storage size. Additional capacity can be added later, and storage alerts can be configured
when certain thresholds of capacity are reached to give the administrator ample warning to add
capacity. This can amount to significant savings, since the price of storage capacity is trending
downward at a fairly constant rate.
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Challenge
The City was also looking for quicker and easier recovery in the event of hardware failure.
Migrating files to the StorTrends unit required no changes to the user clients and produced very
minimal interruption to user access.
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Solution
In this installation, the primary 3U StorTrends unit is backed up nightly. According to the customer,
this backup is done as easily as the server storage it replaced was, and has been a major source of
satisfaction. For more immediate recovery, is also replicated to a remote off-site StorTrends unit.
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Challenge
The remote replication unit is approximately one geographic mile away from the primary unit.
The data stream, however, travels approximately 26 miles, over two 13-mile single mode fiber legs.
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Solution
Replication is timely and there has been no noticeable degradation to the client connections,
between that site and the main site, since the unit's implementation. The replication unit will
not be backed up directly until such time as it becomes the primary unit, during downtime or
inaccessibility of the primary 3U unit.
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StorTrends Solution Provided:
The City took delivery of two StorTrends units, one 3U IP-SAN appliance for file storage and one
1U IP-SAN for off-site replication. Both units included StorTrends iTX data storage software, AMI's
flagship storage stack that is preinstalled in each StorTrends storage appliance. In recent months, the
StorTrends iTX software was upgraded to a more recent version to provide peak support for snapshots
and volume replication.
Summary:
AMI's Director of Storage Sales, Brad Westcott, offered this rationale for the solution that was
proposed by AMI: "We knew that getting back the lost capacity that had been borrowed from other
servers would be key, since this can be a dangerous, albeit at times necessary, approach. We also
knew that replication was a critical area and solid performance was needed for the nightly backups.
But given the fact that a fiber pipeline was in place, the 1U as replication server would be sufficient
in terms of performance, and would also have the storage capacity to handle replication backup for
some time to come. Moreover, we believed using a less expensive 1U appliance for the secondary
storage box would be one place where cost could be reduced in order to get within the City's budget."
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PGA Tour Superstore
StorTrends Targets the Need for Data Replication, Expansion and VMware™ Support
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We never thought that an iSCSI product could perform at the speeds that this product does. The replication speed in particular is very impressive. Speeds and feeds of 100Mb per NIC for this price is well beyond what we expected. |
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- Data Center Manager, PGA Tour Superstore |
Storage and IT Environment Background:
The subject of this case study was the IT Department / Data Center of the PGA Tour Superstore, a leading provider of golf and tennis apparel, instruction and equipment. AMI was approached by the CTO of the PGA Superstore for assistance with data storage needs in an IT infrastructure that includes approximately 20 servers, including 4 application servers. The network environment itself is heterogeneous, with a variety of switches from Netgear and Cisco in use. File sharing is done mostly in the CIFS file format.
As a retail operation with several outlets nationwide, these multiple remote locations access a central pool of storage located in the company's data center on a daily basis. Therefore, quick upload and retrieval of data, along with replication and disaster recovery, were quickly determined to be the key areas of this project.
To break down the application environment in slightly more detail, the Accounting Department is using a customized version of SQL, running on a Windows® 2003 Server. ERP software is running on another Windows® 2003 Server for other objectives of the IT department. The customer pointed out that another reason they selected StorTrends was his intention to move to VMware™ in the near future.
Key needs to Meet:
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Challenge
Data Replication was the key challenge for this installation. Since the Data Center is about 20 miles away from the Corporate HQ, local backups with remote replication had to operate flawlessly and setup easily.
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Solution
The overwhelming customer need was satisfied and went off without a hitch. In the customer's words, "StorTrends was exactly what we needed for my disaster recovery and backup purposes."
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Challenge
After data replication, keeping up with capacity expansion was the second big challenge. We currently have one Terabyte (1 TB) worth of storage capacity in each location. StorTrends added 24 useable Terabytes to the Data Center's capacity. Storage capacity needs are expanding exponentially, necessitating such a large jump. According to the customer, data growth is at the rate of approximately one Gigabyte per day.
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Solution
StorTrends replaced all of the customer's directly attached storage and became the disaster recovery for that and our Compellant storage that was already in place. I did have a time frame of 1 month for the implementation to be fully up and running. The StorTrends solution had data completely redundant in both locations within 2 weeks.
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Challenge
The client expected a solution that could mold to both what needs to be implemented now and can grow and evolve with future needs. One example of long-term change that StorTrends was expected to handle was the client's expressed intention to move to VMware in the near future.
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Solution
A timely installation and commissioning was also of key importance to the customer. The customer specified a time frame of 1 month for the implementation to be fully up and running.
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Challenge
This was a non-issue for the AMI support team. The StorTrends solution had data completely redundant in both locations within 2 weeks.
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Solution
Future growth and evolution is a non-issue with StorTrends iTX, since it is VMware certified and thoroughly expandable through Automatic Provisioning and JBOD expansion.
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StorTrends Solution Provided:
PGA took delivery of two 3U StorTrends 3200i storage appliances. Both systems arrived with StorTrends iTX pre-installed. The two 3200i systems were setup for bi-directional replication.
Summary:
In the words of the Data Center Manager at PGA Tour Superstore, "StorTrends iTX solved the issues of backing up and providing disaster recovery for data at my corporate and data center sites. This includes our accounting, promotions and POS data going both ways. The outcome was great support and a solid and robust product."
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Gestalt Guild
StorTrends Targets the Need for Data Replication, Expansion and VMware™ Support
Abraham George Parel, CEO of Gestalt Guild, a leading system integrator of American Megatrends' StorTrends products in the EMEA region, describes how the enterprise-level features of StorTrends iTX appeals to his customers:
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Based on our experience in the field, we see clearly that our clients in finance-related sectors appreciate the robust disaster recovery capability of StorTrends iTX. Moreover, banks and insurance firms can use the replication technology found in StorTrends iTX to replicate data from remote branches and offices to centralized data stores using replication technology such as snapshot-assisted replication. This has been and continues to be a competitive technological edge that allows us to win when offering solutions to this market. |
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- Abraham George Parel, Gestalt Guild CEO |
Some of the recent installations of StorTrends products done by Gestalt Guild for their clients in Kenya are detailed below:
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SAMPLE INSTALLATION #1: GUARDIAN BANK
The Guardian Bank is one of leading small micro-finance banks in Kenya, with a network of branch offices in the major provinces across the country. The bank headquarters has a state of the art datacenter infrastructure which runs Microsoft SQL databases along with the core banking applications. To ensure compliance with the Disaster Recovery requirements outlined by Kenyan government regulations for financial institutions, the Bank's management began the search for an affordable Disaster Recovery solution. With the StorTrends 1300i from AMI, the Bank's IT team has managed to implement a stable and reliable IP-SAN solution and migrated the MS-SQL database to the storage appliance.
The primary-level backup of the Bank's database implements StorTrends snapshot technology. The StorTrends appliance takes a snapshot every hour and replicates this seamlessly over an IP link to a secondary Disaster Recovery site. By doing so, the Bank has achieved its minimum recovery time objectives (RTO) by every one hour. As an additional method of disaster recovery, the bank has implemented a policy of making a secondary level backup via tape backups at the end of each workday, using Backup Exec software from Symantec with a Microsoft SQL Agent.
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SAMPLE INSTALLATION #2: KENYA HIGHER EDUCATION LOAN BOARD
The Kenya Higher Education Loan Board is a government organization involved primarily in providing scholarships and loans to university students for higher education services. The Board of Directors was keen on adding a data protection and Disaster Recovery (DR) solution to its Data Center. With the help of a 2 TB StorTrends 1300i IP-SAN in the primary site and a 1 TB in the remote Disaster Recovery site, they have been able to setup a redundant IP-SAN solution, migrate their Oracle database, initiate snapshot backups with the Snapshot-assisted Replication module featured in StorTrends iTX, and successfully implement data replication between the primary and secondary DR site.
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