Case Study: IoDynamix Storage Stacks Up Well For Fed's Land Bureau

Through tight relationships with distributors, service companies and vendors, IoDynamix won the deal, and it may bloom into an opportunity with the entire Department of the Interior, said Kees Lawrence, CEO of IoDynamix, Lafayette, Colo.

Until recently, the Denver-based BLM was suffering with an aging offline architecture, and some of its tape backup equipment dated to the mid-1990s. The organization was also using eight-slot autoloaders with out-of-date DLT4000 tape technology, said Dan Ialenti, the BLM's lead systems engineer.

The BLM faced increasing costs of ownership because its storage needs often exceeded its capacity, and manual tape management was frequently necessary. Plus, the age of many devices led to rising maintenance costs. At the same time, the BLM's data needs were growing, due to an increase in the amount of mission-critical data required to manage surface and sub-surface land issues, and legal mandates on the length of time data is stored.

The BLM had been operating under a Department of the Interior moratorium on purchasing storage hardware, but was given the green light to refresh its offline storage architecture due to its pressing needs, Ialenti said. After a year of engineering analysis, the BLM authorized the acquisition of new tape libraries and sent out RFPs in June 2003.

Several vendors, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard, submitted proposals, but IoDynamix won primarily because the Overland Storage NEO 2000 tape libraries it was proposing could be stacked together to form larger libraries, Lawrence said.

That stackability was the key, Ialenti agreed. The BLM currently has a very distributed environment, but is consolidating offices and IT environments, and can easily stack multiple NEO 2000 libraries together into larger single units. "From a product standpoint, that was a big selling point," he said.

For IoDynamix, partnerships enabled it to not only win the bid, but also to fulfill it. The company worked with Annapolis, Md.-based storage distributor Promark Technology, which has government experience and a GSA schedule. Another partner, San Diego-based Anacomp, with more than 600 offices in the United States, handled much of the installation work, Lawrence said. "The DOI liked that we could do installations even in Alaska because of Anacomp," he said.

Installation of the Overland Storage libraries—which included mainly NEO 2000 units but also a few NEO 3200 and NEO 4100 units—started in autumn 2003, and the 160th unit was installed this past spring.

The implementation went relatively smoothly. "The coordination of that many sites can get harried," Ialenti said. "We had to replace SCSI cards at a couple sites, which led to some coordination issues. But IoDynamix stayed on top of it."

Ialenti said the stellar support from Lawrence and IoDynamix helped not only in the initial installation, but also throughout the transition process.

"Any situation that arose, he was right on it," Ialenti said. "Before, 98 percent of our libraries were from another vendor, so now we are in a proving phase as our engineers ask why the change [was necessary]. But Kees is on top of it, [and that] helps with keeping them satisfied."

Lawrence said the contract was a significant deal for his organization. "It is obviously important to my staff," he said. "I was careful to dot my 'i's' and cross my 't's'. There were no funny stories. Everything went smooth."

IoDynamix is being considered for projects in other organizations in the Department of the Interior, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Fish and Wildlife, Minerals Management and U.S. Geological Survey departments; the National Park Service; and the Bureau of Reclamation, Lawrence said.