|
With nearly 1.1 million soldiers in its ranks, maintaining accurate personnel records is the mission-critical goal of the U.S. Army Soldier Record Data Center. That’s why the Indianapolis-based SRDC couldn’t afford to be faced with unforeseen outages and was looking to replace its legacy Hitachi 9960. In addition to the aging system, the SRDC uses SCSI reservations to provide exclusive access to disk-based resources when multiple hosts are accessing the same shared storage resources.
With a goal of eliminating any unforeseen outage in its tier-one production storage, the SRDC was also interested in speeding up the recovery time in order to minimize downtime and avoid data loss.
The deciding factor in the SRDC’s decision to evaluate new servers was precipitated by a profound crash that left their production environment inaccessible by host equipment. In XX, date, the entire Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) crashed and the Fibre Channel port would not initialize.
Since soldiers depend upon the SRDC team to conduct and complete the military’s
promotion process, being without the system would hamper the voting process for enlisted soldiers’ promotions.
As a stop-gap measure, Virtual Systems Administrator, Richard Dillon, needed to get the system back on line and moved their Promise SAN V610f from backup and temporary use to full product mode by connecting it with the SRDC’s 2600 series Brocade switches.
“The U.S. Army has a very low tolerance for loss of data, so immediately when the light turned from amber to green telling us the system was up and running and fully functioning we felt we’d be OK,” said Dillon. “We felt that something was going right that day because given the physical environment and the amount of data we control, we could not experiment – we needed our systems to work.”
Once the SRDC averted catastrophe, Dillon was able to conduct an in-depth assessment and evaluation in order to determine the best equipment for the environment, determine costs and pick a GSA vendor to work with on the implementation of a new system.
For that stage of the assessment and evaluation, SRDC chose to work with Condre Storage, a distributor and integrator of computer hardware and software serving the VAR and reseller community with a variety of specific products in the data storage industry.
“By working with Condre we were able to fast track our supplier and utilize their expertise in helping us the right system for our needs,” Dillon said.
Dillon evaluated multiple vendors but ultimately chose PROMISE Technology. “What made PROMISE stand out from the rest was the responsiveness and reliability we had already experienced with our backup server. Our mission is always to deliver reliable and highly responsive services to our soldiers in theaters throughout the world. PROMISE helped us achieve our goals.”
As the team began evaluating equipment they were also provisioning a 1TB LUN for the VMFS volume that they had planned to attach to that environment for testing space; the World Wide Names of the HBA's were already mapped to the LUN in the SAN.
According to Dillon all it took was some simple zoning and they had visibility of the LUN in their ESX environment. Once that was there, they were able to start running their VCB (VMware consolidated backup) images, from another LUN on the V610f, into the environment.
“We were so pleased with the work our PROMISE backup system was doing, we were enthusiastic about switching over our entire SRDC servers to PROMISE,” said Dillon. “Bottom line, we could not be happier with the PROMISE VTrak 610f. For a device that was so cost-effective to acquire it most certainly stepped up to the plate and showed us that it is a dependable and stable piece of equipment that we are happy to own.”
Much to the team’s pleasure, the new configuration easily handled transferring over 3 TB of data in just over 6 hours and is currently holding their production VMFS volume until the board is closed. As of this moment, it has transferred over 10 TB's of data and is holding strong.
|