Small VAR Lands Big Clients, With A Little Help
That solution provider, Irvine, Calif.-based Consiliant Technologies LLC, is a long-time partner of Hitachi Data Systems Corp., the Santa Clara, Calif.-based enterprise storage array vendor, despite the fact that until recently, Consiliant had fewer than 10 people on its staff. Consiliant was successful with HDS by utilizing the vendor's professional services arm—to customers, those skills made them a standout VAR.
Consiliant's ability to leverage partner services was important to Stonefield Josephson Inc., a Los Angeles-based CPA firm with five offices in California and one in Hong Kong. Several years ago, Stonefield had acquired a small HDS SAN array from another solution provider but found it unsuitable for its requirements.
Still, Stonefield Josephson was willing to give HDS another chance, and in 2004 acquired two new HDS arrays from Consiliant for disaster recovery, said Larry Gallup, senior sales executive at Consiliant.
At the time of the sale, Consiliant explained to the customer that, while HDS's replication software was among the best, it required that the source and target arrays be the same. However, Stonefield Josephson decided to purchase them anyway because of a $15,000 cost difference for the smaller array, Gallup said.
But it wasn't until about two and a half years ago, when Theresa Matonak took over as IT director at Stonefield Josephson, that the CPA firm looked seriously at implementing a disaster recovery solution.
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Matonak started in mid-2006 with Consiliant to explore various disaster recovery options, including whether to house a disaster recovery site in a third-party co-location facility. But Stonefield decided later that year to expand an IT room that was under construction in one of its remote offices.
"With disaster recovery, you want a remote site far enough away so that a disaster in another office doesn't impact it, but close enough so that our staff can get there," Matonak said. "We figured going to Northern California was good enough. Any disaster big enough to affect all of California then becomes not an IT issue but a human resources issue."
Matonak also spent time with Stonefield Josephson partners to determine the recovery time objective (RTO), which is disaster recovery-speak for the maximum time and minimum service level that a business can accept if a business process is affected by a disaster. They additionally examined the recovery point objective (RPO), which is the maximum amount of data that can be lost in a disaster without severely impacting the business.
By that time, Stonefield Josephson realized that its smaller HDS array lacked the expansion needed for use in disaster recovery. Consiliant suggested the CPA firm purchase a new WMS100 SATA array from HDS, and use the smaller array to direct replication at the main data center.
Because HDS's software would not replicate between the different arrays, Matonak and Consiliant looked at alternatives and found Topio Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., a developer of heterogeneous data replication software. But Topio in late 2006 was acquired by Network Appliance Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., which scuttled that plan. "We had bad experiences with vendors getting acquired, which is often done just to kill a product line," Matonak said.
Consiliant then proposed the DR-Scout data replication application from InMage Systems Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of replication and continuous data protection software.
Stonefield Josephson was impressed with DR-Scout's fast recovery, which was typically under two hours, Matonak said. The CPA firm also liked how well InMage handled remote migration and restarting of Exchange and SQL. "Exchange and SQL are among the hardest apps to do failover with," Matonak added.
Stonefield Josephson also virtualized part of its disaster recovery infrastructure with VMware's ESX Server. Matonak's team handled that part of the implementation while keeping Consiliant up-to-date on its progress.
Passing The Test
Stonefield Josephson tested the entire disaster recovery infrastructure last July, including a planned failover, Matonak said. "The clients continued to work online. It was transparent to the user. Everything worked seamlessly. The test lived up to all our expectations and to all the press about the software. A lot of vendors can't live up to their hype."
Gallup said that for a company of his size, having good relationships with the vendors is what drives successful implementations. In the Stonefield Josephson project, for instance, Consiliant brought in services experts from both HDS and InMage. "Consiliant is a relatively small company," Gallup said. "We're more into architectural design and management."
Stonefield Josephson's disaster recovery project is complete for now, and during the tax season Matonak is quietly working on IT planning. "As a CPA firm, this is our busiest time of the year," she said. "So while the CPAs are busy with clients, I take time to do IT planning. I have to be very careful about when and how I implement new things into our environment."
Whatever Works
Gallup said that the disaster recovery implementation at Stonefield Josephson took longer than normal because of other projects that got in the way, such as the need to move the customer's entire data center.
Even getting into the new data center takes time, Gallup said. "The parking lot there is huge, like a city in itself," he said. "The only way I can get parking validated is to bring the parking attendant chocolate. I bring her a box of Ghirardelli or some other chocolate every time."