Case In Point

For KRM Information Service, getting a SAN was not a matter of trying something new, but instead a necessary component to keeping its business going and growing.

The Eau Claire, Wisc.-based provider of recording services for synchronized distributed education events, with a head count of 50-plus, edits and produces CD-ROM recordings of customer events.

KRM produces more than 700 events yearly, each of which must be maintained online for two years. A 120-minute audio presentation requires about 1.2 Gbytes of storage per title, said CTO Neal Sipress.

These requirements were straining KRM’s previous storage infrastructure, which included server-attached storage and a Snap Appliance NAS device. “The demand for CDs grew to where it outstripped the Snap capacity,” Sipress said. “We needed something that could scale larger.”

So in early 2003, KRM called Wenzel Data, a Stillwater, Minn.-based solution provider. The VAR was only an hour away and already had several clients in town.

AD
id	unit-1659132512259
type	Sponsored post

Wenzel suggested a SAN using a Fibre Channel-based Riva array by Chaparral, which was later acquired by Dot Hill, along with QLogic Fibre Channel host bus adapters and switches, said Steve Bishop, national account executive for the solution provider.

Wenzel also added an AIT-3 tape library from Overland Storage for KRM to use for long-term archiving of files.

Jerry Price, CIO of KRM, said his company originally did not plan to implement a Fibre Channel SAN. “But after [Wenzel] made their presentation, it made sense to us,” he said.

It still does, Sipress said. “We didn’t deploy a SAN because we were anticipating a business demand,” he said. “We had the demand. We were applying Band-Aids to the Snap. We needed something that would scale and that had the performance.” —Joseph F. Kovar