Case Study: VAR Constructs Perfect Storage Solution For Builder

TDIndustries, a mechanical contractor and specialist in facility service and construction, had a storage problem and went seeking answers at Enterprise Storage Academy, a technology forum sponsored by Zzyzx Peripherals for solution providers, vendors and potential customers.

The construction company had recently implemented a storage area network: a Dell PowerVault 650. However, the SAN management software was incompatible with Microsoft Windows Server 2003, so the company needed to upgrade its servers and its e-mail platform to Microsoft Exchange 2003.

“We paid a considerable amount for the SAN software and hardware,” said Bill Perry, IT infrastructure architect at TDIndustries, Dallas. The company wasn&'t interested in paying to replace it so that it could upgrade its servers, he said.

At Enterprise Storage Academy, they found Zzyzx, a solution provider specializing in data storage and backup hardware and software.

“As companies are growing, their infrastructures get larger and larger. One of the most difficult things is managing those storage components as they&'re attached,” said Josh Friedman, regional account manager at Zzyzx.

San Diego-based Zzyzx helped TDIndustries implement a storage virtualization solution and a new disk-to-disk backup system with the money that would have otherwise been needed to purchase a new SAN.

The solution provider implemented a storage virtualization product by StoreAge Networking, Irvine, Calif., called the Storage Virtualization Manager.

StoreAge&'s SVM is an out-of-band appliance that connected to TDIndustries&' SAN and allowed Perry to manage the storage network while completing his Windows upgrade.

“SVM allows you to take any type of storage, and it allows you to virtualize within that array or across many arrays so that all of the management functionality is done by the appliance. It&'s [vendor]-agnostic,” Friedman said.

Perry said the appliance is easy to use and has allowed him to create a scalable storage environment without having to worry about product compatibility. “It&'s the hub of our SAN now. It&'s the management piece. Actually, it allows us to use anybody&'s disk. We&'re no longer tied to Dell and their disks,” Perry said.

“Once you put the storage device on your SAN, you allow it to go out there and take ownership of all of the physical disks on the SAN,” Perry said. “When it does, you can virtualize it and say, ‘I need to create a new 250-[Gbyte] volume,&' and you don&'t have to worry about telling it where. … It knows how to handle it.”

Perry said that he was trying to move toward having a single backup server that takes snapshots of the data through the StoreAge SVM device.

Storage virtualization offered Zzyzx a new way to approach customers.

“I would say that the thing that you&'re going to look for is a customer who is [seeking] centralized cross-platform SAN management,” Friedman said. “You&'re looking for a customer who is potentially looking for data migration, someone that [wants] to centrally manage multiple storage arrays from multiple vendors from a central point, or even multiple arrays from the same company,” he said.

Providing interoperability within the SAN and infrastructure components will benefit customers in the midtier to enterprise market, Friedman said.

However, one successful project can open the doors to additional storage undertakings for a growing company or for the solution providers who service it.

“It&'s hard to do the crystal ball thing because it [storage] changes so rapidly,” said TDIndustries&' Perry. “We&'re only trying to look maybe three years ahead, because by the end of the three-year time frame, the equipment is outdated.”