Eagle County in Colorado brings out the bold in people. Its a place where daredevils enjoy skiing, rock climbing, maintain biking, whitewater rafting, running IP SANs, stuff like that.
Just kidding about IP SANs. Well, maybe. Some say storage administrators would rather ski straight down the highest Vail mountain without a single turn than use an IP SAN (see Emulex Slaps iSCSI). But Eagle County IT Director John DeNardo says his IP SAN from LeftHand Networks Inc. is nothing to be afraid of.
DeNardo found the network he inherited a year ago a lot more scary: a complete DAS set up with ALR Pentium Pro 200s and a suite of really old-fashioned office applications, including Windows 95, Novell 4.11, GroupWise 5.5, Corel Office... Well, you get the picture. By DeNardo's reckoning, it amounted to a dangerous way to run a network that stores property assessments, tax records, municipal planning documents, and voting registration. Not to mention records at the Justice Building in Eagle where Kobe Bryant is standing trial.
DeNardos bosses wanted 24-by-7 uptime and solid disaster recovery. But they were far from it: Before he got there, disaster recovery was handled by eight Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) DAT tape drives. Theyd back up to tape, then put in it the bank and hope they could restore from it, DeNardo says. And quite often, they couldnt.
DeNardo hired Siemens Business Services to plan a storage networking system. Working with Siemens, he moved Eagle County to Windows 2000 on HP servers, with Microsoft Exchange and Office XP on 270 Pentium 4 Dell desktops spread across 27 departments.
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