Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise, Idaho

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To run a large Catholic diocese requires a lot of things — including technology. Storage is particularly important to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise, Idaho, because it must preserve historical church records, like Baptism and Marriage certificates, as well as store information like student records, employee data, and financials. In October 2007, the diocese sought a new storage solution. The current architecture included 35 servers that ran Windows Server 2003. Approximately 1.5 TB of data was hosted on disk and one Dell storage array. The diocese wanted additional capacity so that it could support new projects — such as digitally archiving more than 100 years of paper-based records. The organization also wanted to minimize costs by simplifying administration and increasing server utilization.

IT evaluated several storage solutions but rejected them because they did not meet minimum performance requirements or were too expensive. Sun customer DigiTar recommended an iSCSI SAN built on the OpenSolaris Operating System. “I thought it was a crazy idea, but we loaded OpenSolaris on some hardware we had from Dell and ran the performance metrics,” explains Luke Stackle, director of information technology at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise, Idaho. “The results were impressive.”

After meeting with Sun representatives, the diocese chose a Sun Open Storage solution built on OpenSolaris and two Sun Fire X4500 servers. “The amount of storage and performance we could get with the Sun Fire X4500 server running OpenSolaris exceeded the other solutions we looked at,” Stackle says. “And the Sun solution would be very cost-competitive. Instead of putting all of the money into software, we'd be putting money into the hardware so we'd end up with more drives, more storage, and greater overall performance.” The diocese also decided to replace 10 servers that were up for replacement with 4 Sun Fire X4150 servers that would run a virtual environment on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

The diocese IT group installed one Sun Fire X4500 server and used Solaris ZFS in OpenSolaris to configure each drive as an iSCSI target in a virtual storage pool. “The whole process didn’t take more than 15 to 20 minutes,” notes Stackle. The diocese then deployed another Sun Fire X4500 server as a backup storage server. In addition, engineers built a virtual server cluster on the four Sun Fire X4150 servers. After discovering each Sun server could support seven virtual servers, engineers migrated 28 physical servers on to the 4 Sun Fire X4150 servers.

Today, not only does the diocese now have the power and 24 terabyte of storage to enable new projects, but it is also saving money. “Our new architecture reduces our total cost of ownership,” says Stackle. “We also expect to see at least a 70 percent reduction in our server support costs. Performance per watt will also go up significantly, and our overall power consumption will go down because we are not running as many servers. And because of virtualization, our cost to add another server has essentially gone from several thousand to several hundred dollars.”

System availability, which used to be at 90 percent, has also increased. “We've only been in production for a few weeks and we're beyond 95 percent,” Stackle explains. “We expect that number to go up. Our system's overall responsiveness and reliability will also go up significantly because we have a highly available configuration.

“We're definitely impressed with Sun systems and will look to Sun as we expand in the future,” concludes Stackle. “Sun has provided us with the tools and technologies to do a lot more with a lot less.”