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Shonac Manages 426 Retail Stores with FlashDisk

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From operating only 18 stores seven years ago, Shonac Corporation/DSW Shoe Warehouse, which recently became a subsidiary of Retail Ventures Inc. (NYSE:RVI), today operates 426 stores across the country: 126 stores as DSW Shoe Warehouse, and the shoe departments within 164 SteinMart Stores, 116 Value City Department Stores and 20 Filene's Basements.

Such tremendous expansion has resulted in enormous changes to Shonac's merchandising and data systems. However, what has not changed over the years is Shonac's partnership with Winchester Systems, a leading provider of high performance Open Attached Storage solutions for enterprise and missioncritical environments. Since 1998 Winchester Systems has continued to meet the changing data system demands of a company bent on growth. Beginning with a single array, Shonac now has 25 FlashDisk OpenRAID arrays from Winchester Systems. Shonac's storage capabilities have increased a thousandfold, from 16 gigabytes to 16 terabytes.

FlashDisk Provides a Total System Solution

Fred Bunnell, Shonac's vice president of IT, recalls, “Back then, everything we used had internal storage. When we explored upgrading our single NT network with its own Compaq and RAID array, we found that we would have to pay a substantial premium to stay with Compaq because its architecture is proprietary. That's when a salesman from Winchester Systems introduced the whole concept of RAID arrays with open architecture external to the servers. We tested a unit for network ervices, and I was pleasantly surprised. It worked extremely well. It was a sturdy case, the software was good, and it was flexible. From that point forward, FlashDisk RAID arrays from Winchester Systems became our standard for externalizing the disks from the servers.”

Over time, Shonac migrated from the MP RAS UNIX to an NCR 4400 solution. This is when the real performance benefits of FlashDisk began to be realized. Dennis Moore, director of Shonac's Database & UNIX Systems, comments: “With the new RAID technology, you can get all the way up to 110 megabytes per second throughput. We started needing more and more storage because our multiple databases started growing. We ended up buying more and more individual FlashDisk RAID systems.” In this regard, the IT team built a direct-attached architecture, which enabled the company to accommodate the growing amount of data that resulted from adding more users on e-mail and more shared libraries and resources among its newly acquired stores.

Increased Storage Utilization

Shonac's IT experts soon realized, however, that the direct-attached network was proving to be inefficient because it was not using the capabilities of all the storage that was available. The IT team was caught in a bind of having to add storage to some servers even though other servers had available storage. Bunnell explains, “As we were getting bigger, we were finding that we were wasting money in having all this direct-attached storage because we couldn't use it efficiently.”

Again, Winchester Systems was there to meet Shonac's changing IT requirements. They proposed that Shonac consider using FalconStor's IPStor, a SAN management software. The SAN architecture would leverage the existing IT infrastructure by fully utilizing existing storage and reducing the cost of additional storage.

Moore says, “We decided to go with IPStor because FalconStor is a partner with Winchester Systems, and they were able to build a SAN at a very reasonable cost. The FlashDisk configuration with IPStor allows us to control our space. In other words, we're not wasting the storage space because I can move data around even though the system is live. We now have all our arrays hanging off the back of our IPStor servers, and we're serving all our storage up over a SAN. Our entire company is running off IPStor and Winchester Systems' FlashDisk.”

Advantages of FlashDisk OpenRAID and IPStor

FlashDisk OpenRAID arrays gives Shonac the advantages the company needs in storage - speed, flexibility, easy upgrades, reliability, excellent service - all at a reasonable cost.

Speed - FlashDisk, in combination with IPStor, meets the critical speed requirements to collect and process all the sales information from the merchandizing systems of 426 stores. Three terabytes of data, on average, are read and/or written through IPStor. This includes data processing, backups, and normal production user activity. Moore notes, “For example, I'm looking at a report right now. In a whole day's throughput, we had a peak of 210 gigabytes of data yesterday in a half-hour period.”

Flexibility - To Shonac, the beauty of FlashDisk is its flexibility to connect with both SCSI and fiber on the same unit. Moore explains, “If I have a data warehouse that is extremely I/O intensive, I might not choose to do that over the SAN because it's going to drive too many I/Os across the SAN Fabric. With the Winchester Systems' units, I can take one of those units out and just make it direct attached without thinking twice about it.”

Easy Upgrades - Shonac is now on the sixth generation of Winchester Systems' RAID products, having upgraded all of its RAID arrays at least once. “I've found it very easy to replace a controller. It's a simple unplug and plug operation. We are back up in less than five minutes,” says Moore.

Reliability and Low Cost - The IT Department marvels at the reliability of the arrays from Winchester Systems. Running in a RAID 1+0 disk mirroring configuration, none of its 25 FlashDisk units have ever failed. Furthermore, as the cost of storage has been dropping across the board, Winchester Systems remains ahead of the curve.

Working With a True Partner

Bunnell describes the benefits of working with Winchester Systems as a partnership vendor: “I tend to be on the leading edge of some of the things that I deal with, and I like vendors who are willing to 'get on board' and work with us. Anytime I have had a support or hardware issue, we would work with Winchester Systems, and they would do whatever they had to do to satisfy my needs. Their customer support is outstanding.”

The Future: Beyond Disaster Recovery to Business Continuity

The events of 9/11 have brought a new urgency to maintaining business continuity in the event of a disaster. Shonac is currently moving from a disaster recovery plan that relies on tape backup to comprehensive protection from hardware, software, network, and site failures, for nonstop availability of data. This plan will use the capabilities of IPStor to maintain current copies of applications, as well as constantly replicating data to Winchester Systems Open RAID FlashDisk arrays in another building.

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