City of Hilden

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Whenever possible, the city council of the German city of Hilden uses photos as a means of documentation. Its visual records range from ground and aerial photos of sprawling landfills to videos of sewage treatment facilities. Although the photos and videos themselves are not particularly large, the sheer number of stored images combined with other data and applications eventually exceeded the capacity of the existing storage system. Since 2002, the city council has considered installing a SAN, but the price was always beyond its reach. In April 2005, data had grown to the point that the city council had no alternative but to replace the existing direct attached systems.

IT manager Martin Kramer and his team identified three specific needs: a central storage system linked to the servers via a SAN for better data protection; a cluster consisting of three Novell NetWare nodes to guarantee availability; and a consolidated server environment using VMware ESX Server. New software and a tape library would provide more storage space for data backup.

Following a market analysis, the city council came up with a short list of providers that were qualified to deliver the new storage solution as well as server virtualization and clusters. In July 2006, the city council decided that a tender by TargoSoft IT Systemhaus GmbH, a Sun Microsystems partner, which was based on the Sun StorageTek 6140 array, was the perfect match for its requirements. The StorageTek 6140 array offers excellent throughput rates, can be upgraded with both SATA and fibre-channel hard drives, and features software options designed to provide the best price/performance ratio. The StorageTek 6140 array was configured with 16 146 gigabyte fibre-channel hard drives and six 500 gigabyte SATA hard drives. The SAN configuration also included Brocade SAN fibre-channel switches and Qlogic host bus adapters. The low cost of the Sun-based SAN meant that the city council's budget for the first phase of the project stretched much further than originally planned.

In addition, the greater degree of flexibility offered by the TargoSoft solution meant a considerably shorter implementation time by its technicians. "The time factor played a huge part in our decision," says Kramer. The project implementation, including testing and an introduction to system management, was completed within the estimated five days. “The fact that the network was affected for five days instead of 20 while the new system was installed was financially advantageous,” says Kramer. Migration of data by TargoSoft technicians took place immediately following the installation.

Aside from additional storage capacity, availability was another priority of the city council, and the Sun StorageTek 6140 array fulfilled all those expectations too. All components in the array's data path are redundant, eliminating any single point of failure. Should a component fail, the StorageTek 6140 array automatically fails over to the alternate component, ensuring continuous uptime and uninterrupted data availability. Since it was deployed, the StorageTek 6140 array has not experienced a single failure, and availability is running at 100 percent. If a problem were to arise, Kramer says he has no worries because of the 24x7 service agreement the city has with Sun.

Once implementation was complete, it was business as usual for the city. Performance data provided by Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager management software indicated that the array would more than meet the expected performance demands. Kramer was so impressed with the reliability of the StorageTek 6140 array that he was able to retire an existing NAS server earlier than planned. In mid-2007, he added 2 terabytes of SATA storage capacity to the StorageTek 6140. Since the initial deployment, the council has not had a single problem with the StorageTek 6140. "After the installation, we spoke on the phone with TargoSoft a few times, and they showed us a couple of things," says Kramer. "This was something we really appreciated; we haven't needed any training as the system is very simple to manage. In 2007, we even commissioned the hard drives ourselves."

The last direct attached storage systems are gradually disappearing from the city council's network environment, and the ultimate goal is for all storage to be SAN-based. In early 2007, the volume of stored data had risen to 2.1 terabytes, and the StorageTek 6140 accommodates this growth comfortably. The IT team can easily add compatible storage modules to the storage system when the city's budget allows — and without disrupting existing applications.

As a result, the IT team felt comfortable moving the Finance Department software to the new system and transferred its SQL cluster database to the SAN. The IT team used the Sun StorageTek Data Snapshot software retroactively during the migration process to protect critical data volumes in real time, and now backs up stored database images at least every hour.

Kramer has no doubts that opting for the Sun StorageTek 6140 array was the right move. The solution was perfect for the city's high-reliability, easily scalable storage needs and is also the most cost-effective solution — a fact that should please taxpayers. "The key was that everything was available from one source and all components are coordinated with each other. I would make the same choice again," says Kramer.