Iridium Satellite Uses SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution

When Iridium Satellite LLC began weighing its
options for migrating the contents of its data warehouse to a larger,
faster storage platform, the mobile satellite services leader quickly
learned that traditional storage migration paths can be costly and
inconvenient. That is, until Iridium found a groundbreaking new
solution from SGI.

Iridium is deploying the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration
Solution, which gives enterprises the freedom to migrate their data to
any standards-based storage environment. The solution was unveiled
today by SGI (see related announcement).

Unlike traditional data migration solutions, which may keep
customers locked in to specific vendor platforms, the SGI Virtualized
Storage Migration Solution allows enterprises to choose the storage
device that best suits their needs — an advantage that can lead to
better data utilization and significantly lower ownership costs.

Those advantages proved compelling for Iridium, the only mobile
satellite service offering gap-free, pole-to-pole coverage over the
entire globe. To meet its rapidly growing data warehousing demands,
Iridium is using the new solution to migrate mission-critical data from
an EMC CX 500 array to a new SGI InfiniteStorage 4500 solution.

"For us, the ability to migrate to any device and any storage
platform is significant," said Tad Martin, UNIX systems administrator
at Iridium, whose Oracle data warehouse is constantly updated with
detail records on mobile user activity and service use. "In evaluating
our options, we looked at an upgrade and migration path with EMC, but
staying with them would have meant a sizable cost increase. We selected
the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution because SGI offered
clearly superior price/performance with the InfiniteStorage 4500 and a
virtualization component that was literally unbeatable."

The new SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution improves the way
storage virtualization is done by moving volume migration, advanced
data services and storage management onto storage area networks (SANs).
The SGI solution leverages LSI StoreAge virtualization technology.
The StoreAge management software centralizes management of the
organization’s SANs,
and the solution allows users to migrate data simply by indicating a
source volume and a destination storage pool. Rollback capabilities
allow IT administrators to recover from any migration until they are fully satisfied that data has transferred successfully.

"By far, the SGI Virtualized Storage Migration Solution offered a
superior storage virtualization component," said Martin. "In the course
of our evaluation, no other vendor presented virtualization we
considered workable — and certainly nothing this good."

For a company like Iridium, whose satellite network services run 24
hours a day, 365 days a year, non-disruptive data migration is
essential. The SGI solution enables Iridium to avoid the cost and
disruptions of lost access to enterprise applications and data by
migrating volumes while production applications remain online and
operational.

"As we compared solutions, we were looking at a downtime of perhaps
one minute with SGI versus three hours or more with a competing
solution," added Martin. "Had we not gone with SGI, it was clear we
were going to have downtime for a significant number of servers in our
environment, and I didn’t want to expose our business to those risks.

SGI

Iridium Satellite LLC