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Home >> Industries >> Media Industry Excerpts from an article entitled: by: Alan Radding Full article can be read at: …When Greater Media Inc. of Boston--a group of radio stations and publishing operations--found itself running out of room on its sole Windows Exchange 2000 server with direct-attached storage (DAS), it decided to upgrade its server and storage infrastructure. It explored a variety of options and ended up with Winchester Systems' FlashDisk OpenSAN FX-600, which is a self-contained SAN. "We looked at EMC and an entry-level HP SAN, but the price points were way too high and they were over-engineered for our needs," says Robby Mossman, director of information technology. The company bought a two-server cluster and the FX-600 array with a little more than 1TB of storage capacity. It comes with redundant controllers and a redundant power source. Greater Media required redundant paths for its two servers for high availability, for which it needed multipathing software from Veritas Software Corp. Winchester Systems certified the Veritas product… "The HP product didn't have the growth potential. Winchester had the growth of EMC, but for a lot less cost," says Mossman, citing Winchester's ability to scale to dozens of terabytes. The company paid less than $50,000 for the FX-600 with 1TB of storage, consisting of a mix of high-performance SCSI disk and low-cost SATA disk, dual controllers and eight ports. A three-year extended warranty and a cold spares kit were also included in the price. The Veritas multipath software license added another few hundred dollars to the price. The final cost of the entire infrastructure upgrade was about $100,000, including servers, Microsoft software, the SAN and a tape drive. For Greater Media, ease of deployment clinched the deal. "Winchester Systems came in and helped me set it up. Within an hour, it was functioning and I did the fine-tuning myself," says the firm's Mossman. "EMC wanted to design us a SAN, which would have taken time, labor and driven up the cost." … Mossman manages storage through a simple management console. "The hardest part was configuring the servers, not the SAN," he recalls. Greater Media is running Microsoft Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, and is clustering the servers in active-active mode. "We spent several months configuring the servers to my liking and testing the cluster," he adds. But buyers of these products aren't particularly worried about scalability. "If I want to expand the capacity, I can put in more Winchester boxes and manage them all through the one console," says Mossman. Scholik at Alsac/St. Jude has the same reaction: "If we need more storage, I just buy another LeftHand unit and add it to the storage pool. We don't have to go through any forklift upgrade," he says. …Self-contained SANs aren't for every organization. But for those that have been shut out of SAN storage because of its complexity and high cost, or for their lack of FC and storage skills, self-contained SANs offer a way to capture the benefits of SAN-based shared storage.
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