NXTbook Opens NAS Savings

Publisher NXTbook Media is looking to shave almost a half million dollars off its admin and hardware costs over the next five years by shifting from direct attached storage to clustered NAS. In the process, it's ditched Dell for OnStor.

NXTbook Media converts magazines from customers such as Hearst Publications and CMP Media LLC into digital format and posts them onto the Web. [Disclosure: CMP is the publisher of Byte and Switch.]

Prior to deploying the OnStor NAS system, the Lancaster, Pa.-based firm relied on six Dell servers functioning as direct attached storage. (See ONStor Adds Nine Channels, ONStor Doubles Base, and Targeting NetApp.) The servers, comprising 3.5 Tbytes total, were linked together to deliver Web content. A ServerIron device from Foundry Networks was also used for load balancing. (See Foundry Accelerates ServerIron.)

Last year the publisher decided to replace the Dell storage servers with OnStor's clustered NAS solution, deploying two OnStor Pantera P2240 systems earlier this year. One of these is at the firm's Lancaster data center and the other is at a collocation facility a quarter of a mile away, connected via Fibre Channel. Each Pantera includes a 6-Tbyte RAID array.

Managing the direct attached infrastructure was simply becoming too much of a pain for Nathan Powell, NXTbook's IT director. The exec explained that he had to constantly rewrite a complex set of PERL scripts for backups on the Dell storage. "It was very unwieldy," he said, adding that the NAS gateway has freed up one member of his staff from constantly checking on backups.Overall, Powell estimates that he has cut his admin costs by $30,000 to $40,000 a year, thanks largely to better storage management. Configuring new storage on the Dell servers was a time-consuming effort, according to the exec. "It would have taken us at least a week to bring a new box online before now," he said.

With the clustered NAS, this process can be measured in minutes, rather than days, although Powell was careful to check out a number of storage vendors before choosing OnStor.

Prior to deploying the Panteras, Netapp and EMC were also in the frame. "I pretty much did all the research myself," said Powell, explaining that he spent about two months evaluating the different offerings. Ultimately, NetApp was rejected as too expensive and EMC as too proprietary, connecting only to EMC storage.

Last year, OnStor added storage to its NAS gateways in an attempt to compete with NetApp and EMC, claiming cost benefits over its rivals. (See ONStor Offers NAS and ONStor Adds Its Own Back End.)

NXTbook's Pantera has opened the door to hardware savings, shaving up to two-thirds off the cost of new storage. "That comes from being able to add standard storage arrays to the NAS and not having to have redundant direct attached storage," explained Lon Farenwald, director of IT at NXTbook's sister firm Reprint Management Services, who helped with the NAS roll-out.The exec estimates that NXTbook would need to buy at least half a dozen 2-Tbyte Dell servers to cope with its annual growth, costing around $60,000 a year. A similarly-sized storage array costs in the region of $20,000, he added.

This saving will cut around $200,000 off NXTbook's hardware costs by 2012, according to Farenwald, although the initial outlay for the OnStor NAS systems was not insignificant.

NXTbook IT director Powell explained that the firm had to part with around $80,000 for the Pantera systems, although this included an unspecified discount from OnStor.

Storage is not the only technology area being overhauled at NXTbook. The publisher has also changed the front-end servers it uses for Web serving, replacing the Dell machines with HP DL380s, which are now connected to the Foundry ServerIron. (See LeftHand Runs on HP and PolyServe, HP Deal Expands .) "We get better support from HP than [we did from] Dell," explained Powell.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch