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New Storage Options for the Small and Medium Business
SANs for the Small and Medium Business
According to the iSuppli Corporation, hardware and operation costs have dropped sufficiently to make SANs attractive to SMB firms. The market researcher reports that the Fibre Channel SAN market has been growing at 30 percent annually over the past three years. iSuppli expects this growth to continue for five years, with 13.6 million units to be shipped in 2008 (compared to 3.5 million units in 2003). As SMB firms seek to expand their storage and comply with new rules and regulations, they will find themselves turning to entry- and mid-level SAN solutions like the MSA1000 from Hewlett-Packard.
HP and SCO: MSA1000 and UnixWare
The HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 1000 (MSA1000) is a 2 gigabyte Fibre Channel storage system designed to reduce the complexity and risk of SAN deployments. The underlying host bus adapters are supplied by Qlogic. With the addition of two more drive enclosures, the MSA1000 can control up to 42 drives (for a total capacity of 6 terabytes). The MSA1000 SmartArray RAID controllers also allow you to move an existing RAID diskset from a ProLiant server to the MSA1000 without losing the data stored on the logical volume.
Because SCO customers demand robust, time-tested solutions, SCO OpenServer and UnixWare operating systems thrive in environments where downtime is unthinkable. When SCO polled its customers and channel partners regarding storage systems, we found that Hewlett-Packard was always at the top of the list. HP and SCO have worked together for over a year to bring this solution to market. The MSA1000 package offers the same reliability and stability our customers have come to expect from our operating system products. It is a storage solution perfectly suited to the SMB market.
Case Study: Draper's & Damon’s
 Draper’s & Damon’s is a multi-channel specialty retailer of women’s fashions with over 500 employees, 45+ stores nationwide, a popular web site and an annual catalog circulation of 7.4 million.
Steve Gardiner is the Director of IT for Draper’s and Damon’s, overseeing the needs of a heterogeneous computing environment that includes HP servers running UnixWare and Windows. “The UnixWare box is the core of our business,” he reported, from which they run all their operations. In addition to being the central system for a national retail chain, the Irvine headquarters maintains a large catalog and a website, with thousands of digital images (20-100MB each) and thumbnails in an asset management system. Their storage consisted of 300GB of DAS on a ProLiant DL580 with SmartArray cards and MSA30 cages. They were constantly running out of disk space and had to delete data. “We never seem to be able to use less storage,” he joked.
But Draper’s and Damon’s is a firm on the move. With over 40 retail stores (5 of which opened in 2004 and many more planned for 2005), their storage problems were only going to get worse. Early in 2004, Steve finally got approval to purchase an extensible storage solution and an entry-level SAN. Although his firm had standardized on HP hardware (ProLiant servers) for several years, he decided to shop around. The results were not encouraging. Solutions from high-end vendors carried a price tag of nearly $150,000. In April 2004, Steve heard that the HP MSA1000 was due to be certified on UnixWare. He jumped at the opportunity and purchased the hardware even before certification was announced. The deciding factor? “We’ve had a longstanding relationship with SCO and HP.” It also didn’t hurt that the HP solution was cheaper than the high-end solution by a factor of ten. Here is what Steve got for the firm’s money:
- HP ProLiant DL760 Server running UnixWare 7.1.4
- Additional 256MB cache (for a total of 512MB)
- MSA1000 starter kit, 2 HBAs and switch
- MSA30 cage with 28 72GB drives
- 1 terabyte of usable storage
He also purchased a replacement for the firm’s ailing tape drive. The staff only made full backups once a month because the process had to be run during non-peak hours and took twelve hours. The new unit is an HP StorageWorks MSL6030TL , which now performs a complete backup to a single tape in 2.5 hours.
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