Airline Picks Xiotech As Top Gun In Mission
Within days, the top brass that had been balking at the cost of the solution opened the 60-year-old company's coffers.
"The whole solution started prior to 9/11, but the biggest part was going to management. We had started the process but didn't have management onboard," said Randy Witt, manager of the IS department of Mesaba Airlines. "After 9/11, that changed."
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(Clockwise from bottom left) Xiotech's Dan McCormick, Mesaba Airlines' Randy Witt and Novell's Bryon Griffin built a system that would have the airline up and running in a matter of minutes if disaster struck.
Although Mesaba had suffered through the failure of its sole server in 2000, which caused 400 flights to be canceled during the busy Christmas traveling season, cost containment remained a major factor.
The airline considered using Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server because of its built-in clustering features but instead chose to stick with its longtime NetWare networking solution. The company had implemented a four-server failover solution and opted to use the enhancements in NetWare 6 to increase its reliability and create a mirrored site.
Using NetWare cluster services and with plans for a mirror site at a remote location, Mesaba enlisted the help of Novell partner Xiotech, a storage and disk subsystem company, to build the mirror site 10 miles away in Egan, Minn.
ANATOMY OF A SOLUTION
>> COMPANY: Xiotech
>> FOCUS: Business-continuity planning and disaster-recovery services>> ESTIMATED 2001 revenue: $65 million
>> PROBLEM and SOLUTION: In aftermath of a major hardware failure, and then 9/11, airline needed to build a disaster-recovery solution.
>> PRODUCTS and SERVICES USED: Novell NetWare 6.0 cluster services and Xiotech's Magnitude storage hardware and Redi SANs Link software
>> LESSONS LEARNED:
• Upgrading an existing NetWare operating system is more cost-efficient than switching to new Windows 2000 or Unix platform.
• Services arms of major vendors can create integrated solutions.
• Cluster services in leading operating systems, when combined with a SAN, create a fully mirrored site.
Novell Consulting Services and consultants from the newly created services arm of Xiotech crafted a solution using the enhanced NetWare Storage Services 3.0 in NetWare 6.0 and Xiotech's Magnitude storage platform.
Xiotech, a Seagate company and longtime Novell partner, also engaged on the services side of the project after having launched its own end-to-end business-continuity planning and disaster-recovery services in conjunction with research and engineering firm Science Applications International earlier this year.
The longtime partners have also integrated product lines to create value-added solutions for customers. From within NetWare 6, for example, administrators can perform dynamic volume expansion of Xiotech storage. Novell Consulting Services was the lead on the project, but both services arms worked cooperatively on the solution.
"They had Novell Cluster Services in place but wanted to expand it to have a redundant system for disaster recovery," said Bryon Griffin, a field consultant for Novell Consulting Services, noting that the overall design was a joint effort. "We architected the blueprint on this. It took four days' effort, but the whole process was just over six weeks' duration."
Mesaba Airlines, Novell Consulting Services and Xiotech engineers brainstormed and came up with a solution that consists of two Novell clusters and two Xiotech storage platforms connected over IP. At the airline's location in Minneapolis, Mesaba has a four-node Novell cluster connected to one Xiotech Magnitude storage platform, which is connected to a second Magnitude storage platform at the disaster-recovery mirror site. This will ensure that the company's flight and crew tracking systems run on fail-safe mode.
"If a disaster rendered the entire location inoperable, Mesaba could be up and running in a matter of minutes from their disaster-recovery site with the Novell cluster and the second storage platform, which holds a complete copy of the flight and crew tracking data," said Dan McCormick, Xiotech's vice president of worldwide marketing.