Nexsan Delivers Solutions to Improve Performance and Reduce Costs by 40%
Customer Overview
With offices in Washington DC and San Diego, Calif., Bates White is a consulting firm offering services in economics, finance and business strategy to leading law firms, Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Bates White provides the latest empirical and theoretical technologies to data mining and processing that bring clarity to complex issues which, in turn, enable their clients to make more informed decisions.
Business Challenge: Eliminate The Storage Performance Bottlenecks Impacting Business Performance
At Bates White, storage system performance bottlenecks were having a serious impact on business productivity. Sluggish primary storage performance and maintenance issues were slowing the company’s response to customer requests, which impacted overall business productivity. In addition, the firm’s traditional tape backup solution had become very cumbersome, and it was becoming difficult to effectively protect data within an ever shrinking backup window. Bates White needed to optimize storage response times, ensure disaster recovery and implement a highly reliable solution without adding heavy costs or complex management requirements.
One of Bates White’s core customer services is the electronic discovery of client data. To perform this service, client data is imported into the Bates White data center where the company conducts detailed legal research across securely stored client information. With growing archives of data, the storage system bottlenecks and business-constraining performance issues were having a negative impact on customer service. Researchers were faced with slow system response times which impacted productivity and extended customer delivery dates due to storage-related delays. This drove the organization to seek a higher performing and more efficient storage solution to ensure better access to customer data and protect more than 100 TB of data.
“We needed to quickly remedy performance bottlenecks experienced with our previous solution so that we could deliver client results more quickly,” said Larry Chou, network manager, Bates White.
In addition to performance and reliability, Bates White needed a solution that would be easy to operate and manage so they could reduce management demands on staff resources.
Solution: Two Nexsan SATABeasts for Secondary Storage and a Nexsan SASBeast for Primary Storage
To solve its storage performance challenges, Bates White first selected two Nexsan SATABeasts for reliable, high speed backup and recovery of client data. Later, Bates White selected Nexsan’s SASBeast to provide primary data storage to their client SQL Server data. With their storage performance and reliability issues resolved, Bates White was able to efficiently review and analyze client data and increase overall productivity.
“The Nexsan SATABeast delivered a very powerful, reliable and easy to use solution for our secondary storage,” said Chou. “The SATABeast experiences lead us to the SASBeast extending the same benefits to our primary storage applications. We initially thought that we might have to look at two separate vendors to meet our storage needs, but Nexsan solved them both. The SASBeast easily met our primary storage requirements by consolidating everything into a high-performance SAS solution.”
Results: Increased Storage Performance and Reliability with a 40% Reduction in Storage Operating Costs
Since installing the systems a year ago, Bates White has seen exceptional storage performance and reliability. They have also seen dramatic cost savings. Both the SASBeast and SATABeast delivered an exceptionally low capital cost expenditure compared to other solutions. In addition, operating expenses were significantly reduced with the SATABeast when compared to the high management issues associated with their previous tape backup solution. Together, Bates White has been able to reduce their annual cost savings by an estimated 40%.
The high storage density of the systems reduced the need to purchase additional storage that was previously projected to meet increasing capacity demands. In addition, simplified management operations freed staff resources for other IT tasks. And by eliminating the storage performance bottlenecks that constrained the business, Bates White was able to deliver client results much more quickly.
About Nexsan
Nexsan Corporation is a leading provider of energy-efficient, long-term storage systems. Nexsan delivers secure storage appliances and modular, capacity-optimized disk-storage systems for a broad range of applications including fixed content storage and archiving, email, medical imaging, compliance and litigation support, disk-based backup, digital video security, and rich media. Nexsan’s solutions are the choice of small and medium-sized companies as well as large global enterprises and major governmental agencies around the world who are seeking cost-correct, high density storage solutions. Founded in 1999 and based in Thousand, Oaks, Calif., Nexsan sells its products exclusively through a select global network of VARs, OEMs and system integrators. For more information, please see the company’s website at www.nexsan.com
Read this case study in its entirety at http://www.nexsan.com/case_studies/Nexsan_CaseStudy_BatesWhite_GA012810-A.pdf
Showing posts with label archiving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label archiving. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
IPR International Improves Data Security and Availability While Lowering Overall Costs by 40% with Nexsan
Nexsan’s Assureon online archive gives IPR the reliability and compliance-level privacy it needs to deliver high data availability to its customers while reducing overall costs by 40%
Leading disaster recovery and data protection service provider IPR International was facing growing operational and capital costs associated with its data archive infrastructure for customer emails and unstructured files. Needing to lower overall costs without risking the high service-level they guarantee their demanding customer base, IPR turned to Nexsan. Nexsan’s Assureon online archive has given IPR the reliability and compliance-level privacy it needed to deliver high data availability to its customers while reducing overall costs by 40%.
Headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and serving clients in 17 countries, IPR International was founded on a simple concept: that technology will change at such a rapid pace that most mid-size organizations will not be able to keep up with it. Thus, the company has dedicated itself to providing state-of-the-art data protection technologies, so clients can focus on their core business operations knowing their electronic data is safe and accessible at all times.
A recognized leader in managed data center and data protection services, IPR International offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to protect, preserve, secure and make available clients’ data at all times. By offering constantly improving and evolving services combined with a passion for security, integrity, availability and ingenuity, IPR helps its clients maintain their own business operations and supports them through any interruptions.
For IPR, the service levels offered to their customers are critical. While governments and corporations alike require that data be kept for extended periods of time, and in a retrievable form, inactive data can have a negative impact on the performance of the production environment. To help solve these challenges, IPR needed a robust archiving solution that would satisfy operational, performance and compliance requirements for its clients.
“Our customers need to reduce the capital and operational costs of managing and archiving data,” said Kevin Sullivan, head of services, development and marketing, IPR International. “Additionally, our customers need to improve their compliance posture by using a service where they can reallocate their IT resources for other, more strategically important objectives. We created our DataGuardian® service to meet these increasing customer demands.”
With customers ranging from mid-sized law firms and insurance companies to healthcare organizations, IPR takes its DataGuardian service levels very seriously. These types of organizations require constant access to their email and unstructured file data while being prepared to recover from any disaster, from simple server outages to extensive unexpected natural events. To meet backend storage needs, IPR was using a combination of NetApp and EMC SANs. However, the infrastructure was becoming increasingly costly and difficult to manage as the volume of customer data increased. To maintain very high service levels for their customers without incurring extensive costs, IPR needed to identify an alternative archiving solution upon which to base its DataGuardian service.
Solution: A Comprehensive Archiving and Failover Strategy Based on Nexsan’s Assureon and SATABeast Systems
After evaluating the high cost of expanding its existing infrastructure, IPR began to look for a highly reliable, lower cost alternative. During their search, IPR evaluated a number of solutions, including those from Nexsan and EMC. IPR selected Nexsan’s Assureon archiving platform over Centera because of the flexibility in configuring redundancy. With Centera, two copies are required at both the local and disaster recovery site in order to ensure redundancy.
Replicating to another Centera would mean having four copies of archived data (two at each site) instead of one per site. While Assureon can be configured similarly, it also allows administrators to configure the systems so that only a single copy is stored on each Assureon while ensuring the highest levels of data protection. IPR still maintains two copies of the data, but they are at two locations in order to provide DR protection. IPR deployed two Assureon appliances, each with two SATABeast systems, connected via 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel. Each Assureon / SATABeast combination is installed at separate IPR locations and set to failover to the other in case of any failure. With Assureon, IPR has doubled its usable capacity over Centera while spending less on purchase costs and operating expenses. Nexsan’s Assureon storage appliances provide IPR with a safe, cost-effective means to archive the growing volumes of customer email. The appliances keep email online and rapidly retrievable so that customers always have access to them. At the same time, the Assureon appliances dramatically reduce the time required to back-up current, active email by offloading archived email into a separate repository. “We were very impressed with the reliability and flexibility of the Nexsan solution,” said Sullivan. “Assureon is delivered as an appliance, with the storage, and Nexsan remotely connects, monitors and performs automatic updates on the systems without our staff involvement, which makes these systems exceptionally easy to administer.”
Results: High Performance and Reliability Means Strong Customer Satisfaction
The Nexsan Assureon solution has reduced IPR’s overall capital and operating expenses by 40% compared to expanding their previous solution. Cost savings have come from replacing NetApp Filers and EMC Celerra NAS systems (traditional iSCSI and CIFS storage) with the Assureon CAS storage archive. With Assureon, Nexsan has delivered the most efficient and scalable approach to storing unstructured data (email and documents).
In addition, the Nexsan-based storage infrastructure ensures that IPR can deliver high service-level guarantees to its customers while knowing that it has the scalability to easily grow its storage capacity to meet future customer needs. Benefits IPR has received from its Nexsan-based archiving infrastructure include:
• Compliance-level privacy – Assureon uses innovative security features to ensure data privacy. The software establishes an unalterable audit trail for the life of data in the archive; every time archive content is accessed, a record is kept of who accessed it and when.
• High-availability storage – Supporting the innovative Assureon appliance is Nexsan’s highly reliable SATABeast green storage, which provides redundant controllers, power supplies and fans along with support for RAID 6 to overcome double drive failures.
• Automated retention and deletion – Assureon offers automated integrity management and file immutability technology that protect against accidental or unauthorized file deletion. This ensures that files can be retained for regulation compliance or flexible time periods, and be deleted when their retention period is over.
• Self-auditing and self-healing – Assureon continually monitors files for fingerprint discrepancies, protecting them against tampering, viruses and corruption as well as accidental or deliberate deletion or theft. If discrepancies are discovered, Assureon notifies the system administrator and self-heals the file.
“Nexsan has greatly reduced the IT resources required to deliver recovery services thereby improving overall cost-efficiency for clients,” said Sullivan. “We are happy to have selected Assureon as our archiving platform and very content with what the solution has allowed us to do.”
About IPR
IPR was founded as one of the first Managed Electronic Data Protection Service Providers in the United States and is one of the very few companies to have developed and deployed a complete set of services to protect its clients’ data. Currently, IPR protects data for over 240 clients in 17 countries around the globe, providing protection for over 2.5 petabytes of data in our Data Centers. With the opening of the IPR Reading Business Continuity Center in 2008 and the Wilmington Data Center in 2010, IPR has expanded its Managed Data Center and Infrastructure Services to include production and dedicated recovery computing environments for our clients. IPR enjoys a 97% client retention rate, as well as 40% annual growth per year. IPR has been named one of “Fastest Growing Companies” in the Philadelphia Region (“Philadelphia 100”) in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009 and Inc. Magazine ranked IPR as number 593 on its first-ever“ Inc. 5000” list of the Fastest-Growing Private Companies in 2007.
Read this case study in its entirety at http://www.nexsan.com/case_studies/Nexsan_CaseStudy_IPR_International.pdf
END
Leading disaster recovery and data protection service provider IPR International was facing growing operational and capital costs associated with its data archive infrastructure for customer emails and unstructured files. Needing to lower overall costs without risking the high service-level they guarantee their demanding customer base, IPR turned to Nexsan. Nexsan’s Assureon online archive has given IPR the reliability and compliance-level privacy it needed to deliver high data availability to its customers while reducing overall costs by 40%.
Headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and serving clients in 17 countries, IPR International was founded on a simple concept: that technology will change at such a rapid pace that most mid-size organizations will not be able to keep up with it. Thus, the company has dedicated itself to providing state-of-the-art data protection technologies, so clients can focus on their core business operations knowing their electronic data is safe and accessible at all times.
A recognized leader in managed data center and data protection services, IPR International offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to protect, preserve, secure and make available clients’ data at all times. By offering constantly improving and evolving services combined with a passion for security, integrity, availability and ingenuity, IPR helps its clients maintain their own business operations and supports them through any interruptions.
For IPR, the service levels offered to their customers are critical. While governments and corporations alike require that data be kept for extended periods of time, and in a retrievable form, inactive data can have a negative impact on the performance of the production environment. To help solve these challenges, IPR needed a robust archiving solution that would satisfy operational, performance and compliance requirements for its clients.
“Our customers need to reduce the capital and operational costs of managing and archiving data,” said Kevin Sullivan, head of services, development and marketing, IPR International. “Additionally, our customers need to improve their compliance posture by using a service where they can reallocate their IT resources for other, more strategically important objectives. We created our DataGuardian® service to meet these increasing customer demands.”
With customers ranging from mid-sized law firms and insurance companies to healthcare organizations, IPR takes its DataGuardian service levels very seriously. These types of organizations require constant access to their email and unstructured file data while being prepared to recover from any disaster, from simple server outages to extensive unexpected natural events. To meet backend storage needs, IPR was using a combination of NetApp and EMC SANs. However, the infrastructure was becoming increasingly costly and difficult to manage as the volume of customer data increased. To maintain very high service levels for their customers without incurring extensive costs, IPR needed to identify an alternative archiving solution upon which to base its DataGuardian service.
Solution: A Comprehensive Archiving and Failover Strategy Based on Nexsan’s Assureon and SATABeast Systems
After evaluating the high cost of expanding its existing infrastructure, IPR began to look for a highly reliable, lower cost alternative. During their search, IPR evaluated a number of solutions, including those from Nexsan and EMC. IPR selected Nexsan’s Assureon archiving platform over Centera because of the flexibility in configuring redundancy. With Centera, two copies are required at both the local and disaster recovery site in order to ensure redundancy.
Replicating to another Centera would mean having four copies of archived data (two at each site) instead of one per site. While Assureon can be configured similarly, it also allows administrators to configure the systems so that only a single copy is stored on each Assureon while ensuring the highest levels of data protection. IPR still maintains two copies of the data, but they are at two locations in order to provide DR protection. IPR deployed two Assureon appliances, each with two SATABeast systems, connected via 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel. Each Assureon / SATABeast combination is installed at separate IPR locations and set to failover to the other in case of any failure. With Assureon, IPR has doubled its usable capacity over Centera while spending less on purchase costs and operating expenses. Nexsan’s Assureon storage appliances provide IPR with a safe, cost-effective means to archive the growing volumes of customer email. The appliances keep email online and rapidly retrievable so that customers always have access to them. At the same time, the Assureon appliances dramatically reduce the time required to back-up current, active email by offloading archived email into a separate repository. “We were very impressed with the reliability and flexibility of the Nexsan solution,” said Sullivan. “Assureon is delivered as an appliance, with the storage, and Nexsan remotely connects, monitors and performs automatic updates on the systems without our staff involvement, which makes these systems exceptionally easy to administer.”
Results: High Performance and Reliability Means Strong Customer Satisfaction
The Nexsan Assureon solution has reduced IPR’s overall capital and operating expenses by 40% compared to expanding their previous solution. Cost savings have come from replacing NetApp Filers and EMC Celerra NAS systems (traditional iSCSI and CIFS storage) with the Assureon CAS storage archive. With Assureon, Nexsan has delivered the most efficient and scalable approach to storing unstructured data (email and documents).
In addition, the Nexsan-based storage infrastructure ensures that IPR can deliver high service-level guarantees to its customers while knowing that it has the scalability to easily grow its storage capacity to meet future customer needs. Benefits IPR has received from its Nexsan-based archiving infrastructure include:
• Compliance-level privacy – Assureon uses innovative security features to ensure data privacy. The software establishes an unalterable audit trail for the life of data in the archive; every time archive content is accessed, a record is kept of who accessed it and when.
• High-availability storage – Supporting the innovative Assureon appliance is Nexsan’s highly reliable SATABeast green storage, which provides redundant controllers, power supplies and fans along with support for RAID 6 to overcome double drive failures.
• Automated retention and deletion – Assureon offers automated integrity management and file immutability technology that protect against accidental or unauthorized file deletion. This ensures that files can be retained for regulation compliance or flexible time periods, and be deleted when their retention period is over.
• Self-auditing and self-healing – Assureon continually monitors files for fingerprint discrepancies, protecting them against tampering, viruses and corruption as well as accidental or deliberate deletion or theft. If discrepancies are discovered, Assureon notifies the system administrator and self-heals the file.
“Nexsan has greatly reduced the IT resources required to deliver recovery services thereby improving overall cost-efficiency for clients,” said Sullivan. “We are happy to have selected Assureon as our archiving platform and very content with what the solution has allowed us to do.”
About IPR
IPR was founded as one of the first Managed Electronic Data Protection Service Providers in the United States and is one of the very few companies to have developed and deployed a complete set of services to protect its clients’ data. Currently, IPR protects data for over 240 clients in 17 countries around the globe, providing protection for over 2.5 petabytes of data in our Data Centers. With the opening of the IPR Reading Business Continuity Center in 2008 and the Wilmington Data Center in 2010, IPR has expanded its Managed Data Center and Infrastructure Services to include production and dedicated recovery computing environments for our clients. IPR enjoys a 97% client retention rate, as well as 40% annual growth per year. IPR has been named one of “Fastest Growing Companies” in the Philadelphia Region (“Philadelphia 100”) in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009 and Inc. Magazine ranked IPR as number 593 on its first-ever“ Inc. 5000” list of the Fastest-Growing Private Companies in 2007.
Read this case study in its entirety at http://www.nexsan.com/case_studies/Nexsan_CaseStudy_IPR_International.pdf
END
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Petabyte Explosion: How Caltech Manages to Manage Billions of Files
Managing billions of small files effectively requires a clear understanding of data flows and a system based on common Lego-like building blocks that provide services to application owners.
This was the message at the September 29th, 2009 Peer Incite Research Meeting, where an industry practitioner, Eugene Hacopians, Senior Systems Engineer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), addressed the Wikibon community.
Caltech is the academic home of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As such it runs the downlink for the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's orbital space telescope, as well as 13 other missions, processes the raw data into images, and supports the needs of scientists visiting from locations worldwide. The focus of this discussion was the activities of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), which has evolved to become the national archive for infrared analysis from telescopic space missions.
To be sure, Caltech's needs are on the edge. The organization is the steward for more than 2.3 petabytes of data created from its 14 currently active missions. Caltech captures data from these missions and performs intense analysis in what it calls its 'Sandbox', a server and storage infrastructure that supports scientific applications that analyze the data. Once 'crunched,' the data is moved to an archive, using homegrown data movement software.
The team at Caltech had to design a cost-effective means of providing reliable data access to all this scientific data. As well, organizationally, the projects supported by Caltech had to be completely walled from each other from an accounting standpoint. Rather than implement a shared SAN infrastructure with onerous chargeback mechanisms, Caltech decided to use a common set of technologies that would support each of the projects. The technological building blocks are:
A Sun Solaris server running the ZFS file system, A QLogic 5602 FC switch, One-to-three Nexsan SATA Beast arrays.
Caltech uses Nexsan's Automaid spindown capabilities in its archive to reduce energy costs, using Level 1 (slowing the spin speed of the disk) and Level 2 (parking the heads after sufficient inactivity). It does not put the drives into sleep mode (Level 3) and has never had reliability problems associated with spinning down devices.
Caltech uses SAIC tape for long term archiving and last resort off-site disaster recovery. However, its own tests indicate that because of the huge number of small files involved, recovery from tape would take weeks or longer.
This building block approach has allowed Caltech to use common configurations across its infrastructure. Caltech derives four main benefits from this strategy:
1.The infrastructure is architected for fast, simple, safe recovery from failure or data loss.
2.The approach scales nicely in support of Caltech's data growth, which occurs in large chunks of hundreds of TB's and billions of tiles at a time.
3.It streamlines staff training.
4.The "Lego" building-block method allows Caltech to reuse infrastructure when it comes off maintenance, providing it with large numbers of spares and saving money.
Caltech uses a cascading refresh approach when new infrastructure is purchased, placing the newer equipment in support of the most critical parts of the infrastructure and migrating older equipment to less mission-critical areas. In this case, the archive is the most critical as it houses massive numbers of files that scientists access for their research and because it is regarded as a National Archive, which should be kept indefinitely. The Sandbox infrastructure is the least critical because data is quickly migrated off it into the archive.
Click here for the entire story:
http://wikibon.org/vault/Petabyte_Explosion:_How_Caltech_Manages_to_Manage_Billions_of_Files
This was the message at the September 29th, 2009 Peer Incite Research Meeting, where an industry practitioner, Eugene Hacopians, Senior Systems Engineer at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), addressed the Wikibon community.
Caltech is the academic home of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As such it runs the downlink for the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA's orbital space telescope, as well as 13 other missions, processes the raw data into images, and supports the needs of scientists visiting from locations worldwide. The focus of this discussion was the activities of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), which has evolved to become the national archive for infrared analysis from telescopic space missions.
To be sure, Caltech's needs are on the edge. The organization is the steward for more than 2.3 petabytes of data created from its 14 currently active missions. Caltech captures data from these missions and performs intense analysis in what it calls its 'Sandbox', a server and storage infrastructure that supports scientific applications that analyze the data. Once 'crunched,' the data is moved to an archive, using homegrown data movement software.
The team at Caltech had to design a cost-effective means of providing reliable data access to all this scientific data. As well, organizationally, the projects supported by Caltech had to be completely walled from each other from an accounting standpoint. Rather than implement a shared SAN infrastructure with onerous chargeback mechanisms, Caltech decided to use a common set of technologies that would support each of the projects. The technological building blocks are:
A Sun Solaris server running the ZFS file system, A QLogic 5602 FC switch, One-to-three Nexsan SATA Beast arrays.
Caltech uses Nexsan's Automaid spindown capabilities in its archive to reduce energy costs, using Level 1 (slowing the spin speed of the disk) and Level 2 (parking the heads after sufficient inactivity). It does not put the drives into sleep mode (Level 3) and has never had reliability problems associated with spinning down devices.
Caltech uses SAIC tape for long term archiving and last resort off-site disaster recovery. However, its own tests indicate that because of the huge number of small files involved, recovery from tape would take weeks or longer.
This building block approach has allowed Caltech to use common configurations across its infrastructure. Caltech derives four main benefits from this strategy:
1.The infrastructure is architected for fast, simple, safe recovery from failure or data loss.
2.The approach scales nicely in support of Caltech's data growth, which occurs in large chunks of hundreds of TB's and billions of tiles at a time.
3.It streamlines staff training.
4.The "Lego" building-block method allows Caltech to reuse infrastructure when it comes off maintenance, providing it with large numbers of spares and saving money.
Caltech uses a cascading refresh approach when new infrastructure is purchased, placing the newer equipment in support of the most critical parts of the infrastructure and migrating older equipment to less mission-critical areas. In this case, the archive is the most critical as it houses massive numbers of files that scientists access for their research and because it is regarded as a National Archive, which should be kept indefinitely. The Sandbox infrastructure is the least critical because data is quickly migrated off it into the archive.
Click here for the entire story:
http://wikibon.org/vault/Petabyte_Explosion:_How_Caltech_Manages_to_Manage_Billions_of_Files
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