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 RAID 5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RAID 5. Show all posts
Monday, August 30, 2010
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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