Trading Places Became a DataCore SANmelody Customer
Through partner TelosIT
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 20, 2008 at 3:35 pmDataCore Software announced that Trading Places has become a SANmelody customer through DataCore partner TelosIT, Inc.
One key consideration in Trading Places’ decision to go with DataCore was the speed of SANmelody. The volume of transactions and queries make fast read/write storage performance a fundamental requirement because the system needs to support the company’s demanding mission-critical SQL databases and timeshare-ware programs running over Provision Networks (now Quest). This records-management system provides access to Trading Places’ staffers, including front desk personnel as well as cleaning and maintenance staff. The system enables them to update records and check-in guests and in general assures that the properties run efficiently.
“We needed virtualization for flexibility and to consolidate servers and our growth of storage, however, we couldn’t afford to compromise the performance or our need to protect the data and avoid downtime,” said Christopher Cunningham, IT manager, Trading Places. “DataCore works hand-in-hand with Virtual Iron and it delivers the high speed storage performance that we need to do our business.”
The main business driver for the adoption of a SAN, besides high performance, was the redundancy issue. If one server went down, it was imperative that a failover system would kick in right away so that business downtime would be minimized. To accomplish this, Virtual Iron needed a fail-safe shared storage SAN in order to protect the data storage and move and failover virtual machines from one host to another. This business-critical system is now up and running on Virtual Iron. SANmelody provides the robust fault tolerant SAN infrastructure needed to protect the company’s storage and deliver it at high speeds to the Virtual Iron hosts to keep Trading Places’ applications up and running.
TelosIT has worked with Trading Places for almost four years. They had deployed and integrated a fully redundant Citrix-based solution for the property management firm. For the most part, TelosIT has been managing the entire IT infrastructure at Trading Places. They also worked hand-in-hand with Trading Places to design the new, redundant data center. Trading Places made the decision to go fully redundant with Citrix servers, web servers, content filtering, and hardware. In order to go forward, another challenge became obvious – how to cope with server sprawl as the firm had 38 servers supporting its operation. With this growth came cooling problems, increased power needs, as well as the physical constraints that more servers brought. Trading Places’ data center would soon be running out of rack space.
At that point TelosIT knew Trading Places had to embrace virtualization to consolidate resources and reduce the server count and sprawl. This process began by TelosIT installing the free versions of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. The solutions provider started migrating servers – using PlateSpin at the time – in order to build new, virtual machines that ran on existing hardware. “We got 38 physical machines down to 12 VM’s,” said Kevin Carlson, CTO, TelosIT, Inc. “However we were running it on multiple hosts, with multiple installs of Microsoft VS 2005. We knew that in order to get to the next level of consolidation and go fully virtual, we would need an enterprise solution like Virtual Iron. And to do that right, we knew we would need a high performance SAN to consolidate and protect our storage resources as well. With Virtual Iron and DataCore, we were able to go virtual all the way and maximize the use of all of our servers and storage.”
Data expansion was yet another key business driver in terms of adopting SANmelody. What Trading Places had prior to SANmelody was a series of Dell NAS devices. Using this method, as one NAS filled up with data, system administrators would add another NAS that would inevitably fill up with more data, whereby this process was repeated again and again. Yet another tipping point for adopting a SAN, apart from the Virtual Iron deployment and the realization that virtual storage along with virtual servers made sense, was the fact that Trading Places had embraced document imaging as a corporate best practice in order to go paperless. Now, all paper is scanned into a series of file cabinets that are stored on the SAN. “What better way to address our data expansion challenge than with SANmelody, which is now managing a multi-terabyte data pool,” said Cunningham. “Our next phase on the virtualization journey will be to embrace a remote site disaster recovery SAN solution, with complete ‘hot site’ capabilities. This will mean that with another SANmelody solution, we will have our data replicated asynchronously over standard IP networks to the ‘hot site’.”
Asynchronous replication is the third phase in the virtualization project as deployed by TelosIT. Phase I was migrating to a virtual environment. Phase II was standardizing on an enterprise virtual server infrastructure through Virtual Iron and deploying SANmelody to support this. The hot site will be Phase III. When the time comes, TelosIT will be hosting the hot sites for this and other customers. To this end, the main goal that TelosIT is working on is to have its data center full of servers doing replication for hot sites using Virtual Iron and IP based storage mirroring supported by DataCore.
In terms of the IT landscape that has been virtualized at Trading Places, the company has four terminal servers, two web servers, and SQL servers as well as mail servers, which have all gone “virtual.” TelosIT will be upgrading this customer to Exchange 2007 in the near-term using virtualization through Virtual Iron and DataCore. Commented Carlson, “Pretty much everything is eventually going to be protected in Trading Places’ virtual data center. The business objective is that we get everything virtualized to mitigate downtime and increase efficiency.”
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