Genealogy Site Notrefamille.com Upgrades Storage With Coraid

Coraid Inc. has been selected
by Notrefamille.com,
an operator of France’s genealogy site, to upgrade its data storage so
that its massive repository of data records are protected and storage
performance is increased.

From its
head quarters in Paris, Notrefamille.com operates multiple internet portals
including www.notrefamille.com for
women and their families, www.genealogie.com,
a reference service for French-speaking genealogists, and www.cadeaux.com, a personalised gift
site.

As a result, the company’s Microsoft SQL databases contain hundreds of millions
of records, while a repository containing thousands of digital images is also
available to users. This information needs to be available 24/7 and its rapid
growth cannot become a hindrance to the IT team’s ability to manage and scale
the storage infrastructure. Therefore a performance IT infrastructure is
critical for Notrefamille.com, although capex and opex are also priorities as
they allow the business to remain competitive.

Prior to the
deployment of Coraid EtherDrive, Notrefamille.com had been relying on a FC SAN;
however, when the time came to upgrade, the cost was found to be very high.

The
user therefore turned to Alyseo,
a French storage and virtualisation integrator, to help design a storage
environment that would scale with the business, provide performance and
reduce downtime with standard off-the-shelf hardware.

"The high opex on our FC SAN encouraged us to
look for an alternative that would give us similar or better performance while
making our budget stretch further," said Nicolas Menoux, CTO of
Notrefamille.com. "Ideally we wanted
a solution that would be more efficient, easier to manage, and that would not
involve proprietary hardware. We thought it might be a tall order but when the
team at Alyseo showed us what Coraid could do, we knew our search was over."

The
integrator assisted Notrefamille.com in the design and deployment of a
production storage system based on the Coraid EtherDrive Ethernet SAN and transitioned the
genealogy database, user photos, and all the websites to the new
infrastructure. This involved connecting multiple servers to the Coraid SAN,
including a Microsoft Windows file server for the photographs, an image
processing server, a Microsoft SQL database for the records, and a secondary
SQL database tied to a snapshot of the test database.

"Coraid is a game changer and at Alyseo we
always aim to bring our customers the latest and most innovative storage and
virtualisation technologies. We were an early adopter of Ethernet SAN and
believe it provides the right architecture and economics for the modern data
centre. By combining high performance, scale-out storage into a holistic IT
solution, we can help our clients greatly reduce their costs and simplify their
operations," added Yacine Kheddache, CTO at Alyseo.

The snapshot
capabilities of Coraid EtherDrive VSX were used to provide just-in-time
copies of the databases to ensure that records were backed up. The
storage was deployed in a no-single-point-of-failure architecture by coupling
the Coraid EtherDrive VSX storage virtualisation appliance with the EtherDrive
SRX 4200, which was serving 72TB of raw storage. Each Coraid system was
mirrored with dual paths from the server HBAs through Ethernet switches. This redundant configuration ensures that no single hardware failure can cause
a halt in operations, a requirement for an internet-based business.

Nicolas
Menoux has already witnessed significant cost and performance benefits: "With Coraid, the scale out of data is less
expensive than with a FC SAN; when we want to add more storage we just add
another unit, without worrying about getting hit with a big bill. The Coraid
system was about 25% less than the cost of our previous storage yet its
performance is just as high and its ease of use means we didn’t have to spend
much time or money on training the team. The addition of the new storage to our
Windows server environment was seamless and completed ahead of schedule."

Marcos
Burnett, Coraid’s EMEA sales director, added: "By enabling high-performance at a fraction of the price of comparable
FC designs, Ethernet storage provides an innovative and proven technology that
many European organisations are adopting to upgrade their SANs."