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The City of Corpus Christi, Texas, recently completed testing of
a state-of-the-art data storage system implemented by DataSeek,
a technology provider based in San Antonio. The system promises
to save the city money, allow better utilization of resources and
ensure that data can be recovered in the event of a disaster.
The city had storage devices attached to each of 17 servers running
a variety of different operating systems. According to Jim Russell,
manager of Connectivity and Hardware Infrastructure for the city,
the new solution is easier to track and manage than the direct-attached
storage systems.
"First, we have a better knowledge base than we ever did before
of what we actually are consuming," Russell said. "Second,
instead of having approximately six people take care of all the
different storage, we have now brought it down to two people."
The new storage solution is a storage area network (SAN), which
consolidates storage on a separate network that can be accessed
by every server, regardless of platform. Because the city had a
diversity of servers - including an IBM AS/400 midrange system,
a Hewlett-Packard Unix server and several servers running Microsoft
Windows - the SAN was particularly difficult to design and implement.
DataSeek was up to the challenge.
"We were actually mixing many different things that normally
aren't being mixed, like the AS/400 and the HP Unix systems,"
said Ogilvie Gericke, MIS director. "In the end, they were
very successful in doing it."
DataSeek counts enterprise storage solutions among its specialties,
and maintains strong partnerships with some of the top storage vendors
in the industry, including EMC, HP, StorageTek, Brocade and Veritas.
When the city selected EMC's Symmetrix 8530 enterprise information
storage system as the centerpiece of its SAN solution, EMC recommended
DataSeek for the design and implementation of the SAN.
The city came to appreciate DataSeek not only for the value of its
storage expertise, but for its ability to manage the complexity
of the implementation and serve as coordinator for a number of third-party
providers.
"If we had an issue, we didn't have to go to each of the different
vendors and manufacturers," Russell said.
"One of the issues was that we did not have it all under one umbrella
- we had several people taking care of several different backup
solutions," Russell said. "Now we have one integrated
solution taking care of all backup."
"People could not even back one another up because the systems
were very dissimilar," Gericke added. "Now it's a lot
easier to have people back one another up if they're on vacation
or sick."
DataSeek was able to ensure that the transition to the new storage
solution resulted in minimal downtime for the city. The project
was launched at the beginning of the year, with a staged migration
over several months and final testing of all components in June.
Russell credits DataSeek for much of the success of the project.
"We are quite pleased with DataSeek's methodology, the way they
stuck to it and the outcome," Russell said.
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