Small businesses address storage challenges with virtualization and iSCSI

Small businesses, like large and medium enterprises, face the same data storage, high availability, and disaster recovery problems, but small businesses do not have the funds of large enterprises to solve these problems.

When Washington Archives management discovered that DataCore software had a cheap and highly available SAN (storage area Network) product, the company quickly took the product. Even in the current downturn, companies still need to invest in IT infrastructure to cope with data growth and prepare for future economic recovery so they can take the initiative.

Washington Archives Management is located in Washington State Fife, with 50 employees and is a company that specializes in information management services, such as records management and archiving, media storage, document mirroring services, electronic vault, and room file management. "By combining Citrix Xenservers and DataCore Sanmelody, we can get a shared data environment with redundancy, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities," said Tom Radford, the company's system administrator. "

The company implemented server virtualization very early on. The company started using VMware's ESX virtual machines five years ago. Two years ago, Washington archives upgraded ESX from version 2.5 to version 3.0.

Moose Logic is a company located in Washington State Bothell and a solution provider for IT operations in Washington archives. Steve Parlee, director of the company's services and senior systems Consulting, said Washington archives had 10 virtual servers running on two physical ESX servers.

The original schema also includes local storage. One server uses storage on a direct-attached drive rack, and the other server uses internal local storage.

In 2008, Washington archives experienced a hardware failure. Although this failure does not affect day-to-day business operations-because Moose logic designed the ESX server mirroring backup-This failure highlights the weaknesses of the IT architecture.

"Our network has no redundancy," says Parlee. If a component is broken, Washington archives will not continue to operate normally, only wait for this component to be repaired. "

At this point, what the company needs to do is stabilize the existing architecture, or look long and deploy new technology.

Citrix and DataCore Solutions

Radford knows what Washington archives needs: An IT architecture with replication, redundancy, disaster recovery, and good flexibility, and its costs to be within acceptable limits.

As a partner for Citrix and DataCore, Moose Logic knows how to design and deploy a reliable, scalable, high-performance business solution.

"We get a shared storage environment through DataCore, and we get server virtualization through XenServer," says Parlee. "He pointed out that DataCore's iSCSI (Internet Small Computer system interface) Sanmelody could provide a function of replication between nodes and Xenmotion function--citrix XenServer, Allows administrators to migrate virtual machines between two hardware without interruption of service.

Now, the main office of Washington Archives has two physical xenservers and two San (storage LAN) nodes, and 9 virtual servers. Applications on the company's SQL Server are also connected to the San through iSCSI.

DataCore Sanmelody Software runs on the HP DL180 server, each server has 12 400GB of internal drives. The company purchased a 2TB license from the DataCore.

The backup site has a sanmelody and a xenserver.

Sanmelody of the company's headquarters copies the data to the DR (disaster recovery) site. SQL Server also copies the data to the backup site.

The company began implementing the new system last August, and the new system was launched in December.

"It's not a new technology, but in the past, the cost of the technology was hard for small businesses, because it used to be just Fibre Channel," says Parlee. "Fibre Channel costs are generally relatively high.

Washington Archives spent 97,000 dollars, purchased five servers and a switch from Microsoft and DataCore, as well as related software licenses, and included a number of other projects, such as Moose Logic Professional services.

"DataCore is running on a Windows Server system and does not require specialized hardware," says Parlee. "

Washington Archives improves data availability and disk utilization by providing automated compact configuration, high availability, fault tolerance, replication, redundancy, and disaster recovery for this upgrade of it architectures.

This flexible San also provides good scalability and flexibility to meet the Washington archives business growth needs.