The Client
State government agency
The Challenge
A state government agency engaged Haverstick Consulting to provide recommendations and implement a Storage Area Network (SAN) solution to solve its current data management issues and to provide a solid, scalable platform for the future. This agency is spread throughout ninety-two counties within the state and has over 10,000 personnel. It is required to manage over 600GB of storage and expects growth to more than 1.5TB in the next two years.
The agency understands that its data is mission-critical to serving the needs of its constituents. It recognizes that an implementation of an SAN will best allow them to ensure data availability, integrity, and swift access for years to come.
The Haverstick Approach
The Haverstick Consulting SAN design focused on the agency’s strengths in its use of IBM hardware and Microsoft products such as Windows NT and Exchange. The SAN solution selected consisted of Brocade Fibre switches, an IBM FastT Fibre RAID controller, Qlogic Fibre Channel Host Adapters, and Veritas BackupExec software. This allows the agency to achieve its current goals and provides every indication that it will suit its needs for the years to come.
The Fibre RAID controller and its attached disk arrays provide data storage for seven agency mission-critical Windows NT servers running applications such as Exchange and SQL Server and has the capability to support up to nine more servers. Each server has two connections to the SAN using Qlogic Fibre adapters and will fail-over if there are any interruptions on the primary connection. As well, tape libraries utilizing Veritas backup software are connected to the SAN to provide for direct, high-speed access for all backup/restoration operations.
Although many of the currently seven servers are accessing the SAN continuously, most data management functions can still at any time. This includes such maintenance tasks as adding/removing servers from the SAN, allocating/de-allocating storage and hot-swapping hard drives/tape drives.
Haverstick Consulting managed the project from planning all the way through implementation and continues to support the SAN through its ongoing infrastructure project.
The Result
The agency has achieved tremendous improvements in data availability and integrity through the reduction (by 50%) of backup/restoration functions. Data storage grows on the average of 25GB/month without any signs of performance degradation. The agency is particularly pleased about the SAN’s ability to accommodate higher than expected data usage on one of its mission critical servers by dynamically allocating more storage to it and not affecting system/data availability. | 
