And it was: Pforzheim discovered that the companies selling this technology had a serious shortage of sufficient practical experience implementing virtualization solutions.
Eventually, the city discovered FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) and its in-band virtualization offering, IPStor. Tests began in December 2001. Using Intel Corp.'s (Nasdaq: INTC) Iometer tool, which analyzes server performance, Pforzheim's IT personnel generated a data load that exceeds the scope of the client/server environment. Operating at full capacity, redundant storage disks and RAID controllers were temporarily put out of service in order to simulate failure scenarios and test the response to these kinds of conditions.
"The interplay between virtualization components and FC storage is the crucial criterion," says Hurst. "Insufficient performance and scalability would have repercussions for the whole system." The virtualized storage was quickly rendered available; the IT team did not report any drops in performance with IPStor, Hurst says. It was only in the Fibre Channel environment that problems emerged, city IT officials noted, as the interoperability between numerous individual components -- cards, switches, and so on -- had to be examined in the individual case by the manufacturer despite the certification insurances.
Pforzheim adopted IPStor into daily use at the beginning of 2002 together with the components for the SAN. So far it has not shown any weaknesses and was put through a significant test recently when the city replaced a database server with 1.5 terabytes of integrated storage and transferred it to the SAN. The allocation of virtualized drives via the IPStor console took about 10 minutes, according to Hurst.
Pforzheim's IT infrastructure includes QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC) switches and HBAs, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) arrays, Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) servers, Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) software and host of other pieces that make up the jigsaw. For a complete list check the attached table
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