"It seems like they grow daily -- all I hear from the DBAs [database administrators] is more, more, more," says Lapidot. "At least with this solution I can just pop in another external storage box and integrate it into the rest of the SAN." According to HP, the VA7140 has a maximum capacity of 6.5 TBytes. The firm's older, external storage system from Sun didn't provide the option to add more storage.
Perry Ellis actually went live with its HP SAN about nine months ago. "I wouldn't have talked to anybody if it hadn't worked!" exclaims Lapidot [ed. note: except his therapist]. But even if the SAN "explodes," he adds, the company has signed a three-year technical support contract from HP, though Perry Ellis hasn't had to use it yet.
Then again, the HP SAN wasn't exactly prt-à-porter. Perry Ellis enlisted the consulting services of both HP and Compaq (prior to the closing of their merger) to get it installed. There were times when as many as 15 consultants worked "some very late nights" to resolve critical issues, according to Lapidot.
Lapidot says the company did consider other vendors, including IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). But one of the major factors that tipped the scale in HP's favor, he says, was the AutoRAID feature of its VA7410. AutoRAID automatically decides whether to place data in RAID 5 double parity or RAID 10, based on how frequently it's accessed. (Most recently used data is moved to RAID 10 for better performance.)
"Flexibility is key for us. Instead of me having to repartition the server and do all this hard work, this thing does it on the fly automatically."
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