Case Study: Danger! Danger! Storage Overload

storage

Take, for example, the National Robotics Engineering Center, at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which had a severe storage problem.

The staff had grown from 40 to more than 100 in less than two years. Computer services manager Jonathan Woytek was hesitant to add users because he knew that the existing storage system wouldn't be able to handle the increase. The Mini Library Express DLT Loader they were using was not going to be sufficient.

The system also had no way to connect information stored on a variety of servers. "The real problem, besides the fact that there was absolutely no redundancy on the disk, was that all of the storage was divided by platform," Woytek said. "There was no cross-platform infrastructure."

Woytek then turned to Huntington, N.Y.-based solution provider HorizonTek and sales account executive Hava Gross to upgrade his storage environment and secure the center's complex robotics engineering data. Since HorizonTek had provided the center with its existing storage system, it was familiar with the institution and its needs.

"Their problem was that the tape drive was very old," Gross said. "The speed wasn't quite there anymore. They were interested in taking a look at new technology."

Gross suggested that Woytek look at different scalable tape systems. "Depending on where he went in the next year or two, it allowed him a lot more growth. I definitely recommended the backup software because that was a definite need," Gross said.

Woytek explained, "We wanted to upgrade the backup system and hadn't yet committed to what kind of storage system we wanted to get. We needed something we could expand because we have no good way of predicting what kinds of projects we're going to get in two to three years. We needed to have something that we could very easily add another block to."

The center chose the Overland NEO 4100 tape library with 60 slots, capable of holding up to 48 Tbytes of data. "We went with an iSCSI solution so that we didn't have to buy a gigantic rack and then half populate it and then fill it up and we would be out of space," Woytek said. To save money, the center installed the hardware itself.

After evaluating disk backup products from Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Sun Microsystems, Woytek chose other Overland products to meet backup needs. He purchased a REO 4000 disk backup applicance with 4 Tbytes of disk space and a REO 9000 applicance with almost 9 Tbytes. "These particular units were pretty cheap and gave us the ability to add storage in blocks," Woytek said.

And that capability may soon be necessary as one project has already allocated eight of the center's 16 Tbytes of storage space, and Woytek said it could expand even further.

In spite of their prior relationship, HorizonTek wasn't a definite shoe-in for the Robotics Engineering Center's business.

"They're usually my first call for these things," Woytek said. "I get base quotes from them. But because of the university's purchasing policy, I [have] to go out and research other options."

With the lowest price quotes and a history of satisfactory service, HorizonTek once again won the university's business. Woytek said Gross and HorizonTek have been good at making price quotes work for the center so they can continue to provide the equipment needed for its projects.

Gross advises other solution providers looking to generate business in the university market to cast a wide net.

"Every university has several departments, so you don't want to limit yourself," she said. "Each of these departments is basically responsible for backing up their data."

Although the initial installation was hampered by a few snags while upgrading Linux servers, Woytek said users are providing excellent feedback on the system. "We've only had one minor issue since we set it upso I'm very happy with the system," he said.