The Great SAN Investment

"Data still is increasing," Witt says. "So there is a wish list, and there is reality. Hopefully, we'll get the wish list."

The crunch Witt is facing is not atypical among customers. But at some point,when the political world stabilizes and the economy returns to an upswing,customers are going to start spending again. So one of the best things VARs and integrators can do is focus on the technology end users were beginning to embrace before the war put budgets in a state of limbo: storage-area networks (SANs).

According to VARBusiness' 2003 State of Enterprise Spending research, storage is still among the top six most important areas in enterprise budgets for this year. And in the past few months, customers have implemented SANs,a clear indication businesses are finally starting to open their eyes to the technology's benefits.

Sam Blumenskyk, manager of technology operations at New York-based law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel LLT, recently had VAR Manchester Technologies implement an 800-GB SAN for litigation support. Now, he is in the beginning stages of installing a 3-TB SAN for both disaster-recovery and production.

The cost of SANs vary. They can set an end user back anywhere from $125,000 to in excess of $500,000, depending on the size of the installation. But what customers are finding is that after the initial large implementation expense, the long-term return on investment has been well worth it.

For instance, Mesaba Airlines, which employs roughly 3,800 people and operates 104 aircrafts with hubs in Memphis, Detroit and Minneapolis, started a SAN by purchasing Xiotech's Magnitude subsystem with an initial 200 GB of capacity. It has now grown to 2 TB. Part of the decision to do so stemmed from a December 2000 failure of the airline's flight-tracking server that resulted in 323 cancellations. "It was just a standalone [server]," Witt says. "We didn't have any other system."

Some of the other technology jobs it has undertaken include migrating some critical applications, such as the one that processes the fuel-reloading and flight-tracking system, onto the Novell Cluster services program. And the SAN is growing as more applications are being added into the system, such as a trip-bidding application in which flight attendants put in requests for the scheduled flights they want to work.

Awestruck In Arizona
Like Mesaba, Arizona's Yuma County spent time and money to install a SAN before its current budget crunch. It purchased four storage subsystems from Xiotech, mainly because the device comes with a built-in virtualization capability, says Yuma County CIO Matthew McClymonds. Since the implementation, Yuma County has added several services to it.

For instance, the county attorney wanted to put a case-management system online, and McClymonds had his own work-order program for the IT department on the system. Not only does he now need to buy more software licenses for his backup system, McClymonds will have to update his disaster-recovery plan because of the recent purchases.

"Before it was strictly backup. Now that we have a SAN and a robotic tape backup and Novell Cluster services, it is changing the entire facet of it," he says. "We are hoping to get to the point that when a server crashes, the service does not go down. It's more of a disaster-avoidance rather than a disaster-recovery [system]."

Still, McClymonds is almost beside himself when he talks about the SAN technology. "The virtualization is awesome," he says. "When we purchased it, I went to a few conferences, and Gartner was standing up on stage telling everybody there was no such thing as virtualization in storage. It was kind of cool knowing that I had it."

In February, Mesaba Airlines also started to work on a disaster-recovery solution, and has built up a primary and secondary SAN that uses RAID 5 and RAID 1 0 for its critical applications. The primary site is located in Minneapolis, while the secondary site is in Eagen, Minn., using Nishan Systems switches to mirror data over a 10-mile distance through IP storage. "It was so simple to set up," Witt says. "It took longer to rack-mount than configure the Nishan switches."

Mesaba is still migrating data from its old servers to the new SAN. Almost 1 TB of data is being evaluated for migration purposes. And it has purchased new servers in the deal.

Incremental Adds
Despite SANs' promise, VARs and integrators confirm that, right now, customers are just spending money on what is essential. Take the sales activity in disk replication, says Ed Hartman, president and COO for IMS Systems, a storage VAR.

"But we are seeing that on a small scale," he says. "People are not doing entire systems. They are looking at critical applications and prioritizing what application needs this level of protection and availability."

That holds true for Ping Golf Club, which moved its network storage onto a SAN and is adding other applications onto it. Since the initial implementation, which involved Phoenix-based VAR Bryan Vincent Associates, the company has spent money just for incremental technology additions. For example, the biggest purchase Ping Golf Club recently made was for a Brocade switch.

"It's been really cost-effective, especially when you consider the manageability," says Kent Crossland, IS director at Ping. "Now when we added these new data-management applications onto it, we didn't spend any time investigating the storage. We just added the applications to the SAN."