Storage Consolidation - HA and DR
Requirements
This is a manufacturing company having ten servers running applications such as SQL, SAP, File/Print servers. Each server had its own direct attached SCSI RAID disk drives. Some of the servers had very little hard drive utilization. Some servers were using them at near capacity. The customer was planning to add more SAP modules that needed bigger drive capacity for the servers running SAP. Different servers had different storage expansion requirements to meet the business needs for the next 5 years.
Key Objectives
- Meet the future storage requirements.
- Storage consolidation to minimize, unused storage space and improve the cost per megabyte of storage.
- High availability & disaster recovery.
- Investment protection.
Our Solution
Based on customer future business growth, we designed a storage solution. Our solution to address these needs was a storage area network (SAN) based on EMC Clariion CX300. The CX 300 was attached to the servers via Brocade fiber switches. For redundancy purposes each server was installed with two fiber adapters (HBA). They communicate with the CX 300 via independent paths. By using the EMC provided Navisphere the customer is able to expand the storage sizes as and when required on a real time basis without having to shutdown the servers. In the event that one storage path from servers to the SAN fails, EMC powerpath software helps to recover connectivity to the server seamlessly .
The SAP data in SQL databases were migrated from the direct attached storage to the SAN. IBM Tivoli storage manager backup the SAN data onto IBM 3582 tape library. Tivoli manages the complex backup requirement that the customer had. As a disaster recovery solution the SAN data is replicated online to a remote site using WANSYNC software across a T1 communications link. At any given time a current copy of all the data is also available remotely. By using the snapshot feature available in the SAN the customer is able to take a snapshot of all the data at any given time and use that snapshot for backup or testing purposes.
