"After we doubled in size the environment became unstable and servers were having trouble," Marsh said. With the innovative concrete division's reliance on images and digitized photos, databases filled up very quickly with big chunks of data. "If one application had a problem, we had to restart the servers. It affected everyone." Penick's growth has continued; he now supports 120 users and 150 machines internally.
Backup was also problematic; using tape drives that held 27 Gbytes was getting too cumbersome to manage. "It was really hard to defrag the drives because I was running out of space--and my vendor at the time just kept telling me to add another drive," Marsh explained. "I didn't see an end in sight to the management problems."
In May 2003, Marsh brought in Networks Plus, a systems integrator. "We told them, 'Make us more reliable, create more redundancy and get us into the 21st century," Marsh said. While he had never heard of IP-SANs, Networks Plus was very bullish on them and invited Marsh to examine their installation.
He thought it was an ideal fit for Penick, so in June 2003, the company got an IP-SAN, consisting of two Storage Concentrator i2000s from StoneFly Networks for redundancy and failover; a Nexsan ATAboy2 RAID storage; a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch from Dell; and six Microsoft and Intel iSCSI initiators. Penick also installed dual active directories running ShadowCopy to take two snapshots each day of all server files.
Marsh the company spent about $30,000 for the IP-SAN, and the servers, power arrays, switches and Windows upgrade were about $200,000. He estimated the installation will save the company at least $10,000 per year.
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