The privately held company, which makes custom glass, freight and other specialized elevators for airports, hotels, schools, hospitals and industrial plants and supplied 20 heavy freight elevators for Los Angeles International Airport's recent renovation project, sells directly to architects and contractors as well as on an OEM basis to big-name elevator manufacturers such as Schindler. Minnesota Elevator teamed with Schindler on the multi-million dollar freight elevator deal for LAX.
The custom elevator business, like Minnesota Elevator's product, goes up and down. About five years ago, the company's business doubled when one of its main competitors went belly up, and then hit another growth spurt two years ago during a commercial building boom.
That, along with the increase in CAD drawings, intensified the company's need for a storage-area network (SAN) that could grow with it. Its former hub-based Compaq backup system, which sent data to a tape library, was at capacity. "We just couldn't scale our storage enough " that was our biggest concern," Burns said.
The company's Fibre Channel SAN, which it installed over a year ago, has plenty of headroom with two gigabytes of storage space and room for expansion space. Minnesota Elevator chose the Brocade Silkworm SAN switch and Adaptec SANbloc Dual RAID array with 14 Seagate drives for cost reasons and because the architecture is component-based, so it's easy to add disk capacity as needed.
At the time the company issued its RFP for the storage system, iSCSI was still too new so Fibre Channel was the only option, Burns said. Minnesota Elevators spent about $100,000 on the SAN, which it purchased through St. Cloud-based reseller Marco Inc. "We just pop another enclosure on, populate it with drives and away we go," Burns said.
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