Storage Switzerland recently spoke with David Markley, CIO of Stronghold Data, a DR and IT outsourcing company based in the midwest. Stronghold, in business since 2002, has their two main data centers located in underground facilities, (formerly rock quarries) making them impervious to most natural disasters. They feature comprehensive and multiple redundancy of all critical systems, including power, security, networking, compute and storage. Stronghold provides a range of services from simple file-level backup to system-level mirroring and complete infrastructure hosting.

Why Virtualization at Stronghold

While every business must react to their customers’ needs, for some it’s a fundamental part of their value proposition. For Stronghold Data, as an IT service provider, this means being able to make compute and storage infrastructure capacity available to support the DR services that are their primary products. And, they need to make this capacity available to their customers much faster than could be done with the traditional process of buying and deploying servers and storage.

They chose to virtualize their data center environment with VMware because it gave them the ability to decouple the services offered to their customers on the front end from the physical compute and storage infrastructure on the backend. This gave them the flexibility to keep up with their customers’ demands for capacity, safely storing each organization’s data, and making it available quickly.

To make this work, they needed a standard, expandable architecture that could provide capacity required by a service provider. But, it also needed be efficient to support their business model. Service providers need to take advantage of economies of scale in order to keep costs competitive and turn a profit. This means costs must decrease on a per-capacity or per-customer basis as they grow their business.

One of the areas of chief concern is management, especially storage. If not done right, the cost to manage an expanding virtual server environment and its associated storage capacity can ruin the economics of a profitable IT service provider.

Server Virtualization needs Storage Virtualization

Part of the reason to develop a virtual server environment utilizing VMware is to take advantage of its unique ability to move VMs and resources to meet capacity requirements as well as performance service levels. VMware tools such as storage vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler help maximize operational efficiency and keep costs under control. But, in order to leverage these capabilities, Stronghold needed to implement a shared storage infrastructure.

Again, Stronghold’s primary business is providing secure backup and DR services. To do this, their software hashes the files they’re backing up and encrypts them for safe transfer to the offsite data vault. This process is fundamental to the way their system handles and protects data, but effectively multiplies the number of files they have to track and store. When they considered storage systems the question of SAN (block) vs. NAS (file) came up. Markley determined the file-oriented architecture of their backup process could be much more efficiently managed with a scalable NAS solution.

Why EMC Isilon

EMC Isilon was chosen for several reasons. Stronghold needed a solution that would scale almost without limit, but more importantly, they needed a system that would scale without disruption. In their business, they can’t move data around to accommodate growth and they can’t go down for a maintenance window in order to add capacity. According to Markley, adding capacity to their former iSCSI-based storage system was “painful”, requiring significant time to allocate LUNs and balance data between existing volumes and new ones.

EMC Isilon enables them to add modules as needed to the back end of their existing storage infrastructure without affecting users on the front end, and without consuming a lot IT’s time in the process. “It took longer to rack the new EMC Isilon modules than it did to add the storage”, said Markley.

Their backup process creates billions of small files, which generates a significant amount of metadata as well. This all must be tracked by the storage system. The ability to index and manage a large dataset with a very large number of file objects is probably as important as raw performance. In this area, Isilon has performed extremely well. The system does the file indexing in the background automatically, allowing normal system use at the same time. It also shortens the actual time required to ingest data, something that’s critical when they add new customers and have to load large data sets into the system.

400+ Days Continuous Uptime

Occasionally, Stronghold needs to replace components, typical for a system of this size. In this area, the Isilon system worked as advertised, with zero impact to users or system performance. The one time a node went down, the system didn’t flinch and the node was brought back up with no user or performance impact. The point is that when components do wear out and subsystems may occasionally go down, highly-available storage systems need to handle it gracefully. In this regard, Isilon has again worked as advertised.

Stronghold also needed a storage system with the name recognition that would enhance their own offering, and make their customers even more confident. Markley said Isilon’s long history and name recognition in the storage space helped in this area. Also, EMC Isilon’s reputation for customer support was a big factor. When they’ve needed support, Markley said Isilon has been excellent, “even the first level support people are great and can handle most of our issues”.

On average, they spend just 10 minutes per week managing the Isilon infrastructure. Isilon’s OneFS file system means no LUN allocation, no data migration and no downtime - truly a set-and-forget solution. “This frees our people up to spend time on internal infrastructure development and customer support.”

Summary

For Stronghold Data, EMC Isilon storage virtualization unlocks the power of server virtualization, which is fundamental to maintaining their business. With VMware, they can view servers as commodities that are allocated as needed and reallocated to support workloads and business levels of their customers - which can and do change without notice. To make that happen, Isilon unhooks them from the limitations of physical storage and provides the characteristics essential to a service provider’s infrastructure: uptime, scalability, efficiency, agility and simplified management.

Isilon is a client of Storage Switzerland

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