Building a SAN, implementing virtualization, and consolidating email were the key processes of the first phase. Hiatt says Advantage looked at EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and StorageTek (now Sun) SANs before settling on StorageTek for a midrange system. Hiatt says there were two major factors: Cost; and StorageTek sold the same systems through an OEM deal with Engenio that IBM, NCR, and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) sell.
"We viewed it as an investment protection," he says. "If for some reason StorageTek said 'We're going to get out of storage business,' we still had Engenio arrays available from other vendors."
Advantage chose FaclonStor IPStor software for snapshots and replication and EMC's VMware to virtualize servers. "Before we employed a SAN, we had storage all over the place," Hiatt says. "We envisioned the day we would virtualize servers. If you go offline with two servers, it's not bad. Go offline with 100 servers, it's a different story."
Email management was perhaps the biggest headache of the initial phase. Hiatt says the average user email box came to 1 Gbyte, running the company-wide total to 3.5 Tbytes with a projected annual growth of 40 percent. He estimated he would have to add eight new Microsoft Exchange servers, storage disk, and licensing and maintenance that would have cost around $1 million up front and $225,000 in annual labor costs. He considered placing quotas on user email, but was overruled.
"We wanted to use quotas, but the legal department said, 'We dont want any data on local computers, we want it on the server,'" he says." We tried to convince them that wasn't the best approach, but legal spoke and we had to listen."
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