Las Vegas Review-Journal

Five years after becoming the corporate headquarters site for an expanding media company, the Las Vegas Review-Journal upgraded its data center and beefed up its network storage with Pillar Data Systems SAN-NAS combo.

The Las Vegas newspaper’s old data center was built 20 years ago to hold 20 servers and service one newspaper in the days when nobody heard of digital publishing. Since 2001, the data center has not only supported the Review-Journal’s electronic publishing needs but served as headquarters for the Stephens Media Group -- which includes 12 daily newspapers and 40 sites across the country.

Last October, the Review-Journal began moving to a larger data center in the same building. But most of the data migration didn’t begin until infrastructure manager Steven Olson installed his Pillar Axiom early this month -- and it won’t wrap up until he completes migration of about 4 Tbytes of data on Windows and Mac servers over the weekend.

Although the Review-Journal has used an EMC Symmetrix high-end SAN and EMC Celerra NAS since 2001, it still had production data on an Apple Xserve RAID system and email and other Windows applications running on direct-attached servers.

“As we moved into the new data center we wanted to consolidate all storage from all our platforms,” Olson says. “We only had critical data centralized, with storage scattered all over the place. We’ll probably use about 6 Tbytes up after consolidating.”That gives him plenty of room to grow into his 20-Tbyte Pillar system, which consists, to use Pillar's terminology, of a SAN slammer [controller], NAS slammer, and four storage bricks [disk enclosures]. (See Pillar Leaves Post – At Last.)

Olson says he was outgrowing his Symmetrix. But rather than buying another big machine, his group decided to move some services that don't require the speed of Symmetrix to another disk array. The Review-Journal will stick with the Symmetrix for primary storage for now, with Pillar used for NAS and backup. “We left the Celerra behind,” Olson says.

Las Vegas may be the gambling capital of the world, but Olson is hedging his bet by not putting his mission-critical data on a new vendor’s system.

“Being a new technology and company, we wanted to test the waters first with Pillar,” he says. “This time we went with large [SATA] disks, and not many of them. We have four bricks. For a production system I would want something configured differently, in the end it could be Pillar but I’d want smaller disks spread across more spindles for more speed.”

Pillar is SATA-only now and doesn’t have those smaller disks spread across more spindles. But Olson says Pillar does have a lot that established storage vendors don’t, such as quality of service (QOS) -- the ability to set policies to give certain applications priority over others -- and the ability to replicate to any system.“When we made the decision to go with Pillar, nobody had quality of service for SANs, which is amazing,” Olson says. “After all this time, you would think that would be more prevalent. That’s one of the things that made Pillar compelling.

"We’re going to connect 30 servers to one storage environment. One of the things that bothered me about centralized storage was how to say, ‘This server’s going to be the top priority, this one is a lower priority.’ Pillar’s quality of service lets us have tier 2, tier 3, and tier 4 storage in the same box. We have Lotus Notes at the highest level, home directories on a midrange level, and archived data on lower priority disk.”

Olson’s original short list consisted of EMC Clariion, IBM Shark, Network Appliance FAS3020, and Pillar. Because he was looking for multiple tiers, he wanted a vendor that offered NAS and SAN.

Olson says his choice came down to NetApp and Pillar -- vendors that offer NAS and SAN in the same system. He liked Pillar’s upgrade path better. “If I want to upgrade, with NetApp I had to replace the head,” he says. “With Pillar I just add another slammer, and I’ve doubled capacity at the head because both can talk to the disk pool. That’s a nice architecture.”

Olson also wanted to be able to replicate data between his primary storage and development testing environments. He found there was no way to replicate between EMC Clarion and Symmetrix arrays. NetApp could replicate between its own systems, but not to EMC’s. Pillar’s Axiom Volume Replicator lets him replicate to any system.Price was another issue. Olson spent less than $200,000 on Pillar, which is about the amount he says he pays each year for maintenance and software licenses to EMC.

Olson's hopes for Pillar are high. “A lot of vendors tend to get stagnant, but Pillar is one of those companies that will do things differently,” he says.

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch

Organizations mentioned in this article: