Swaim and his five colleagues are responsible for designing and building the company's SANs, managing its mainframe and Unix systems, and working with the Windows server group. The group installed the two McData directors, set up with dual redundant fabrics, over the long July 4th weekend last year. They connected the development servers first before moving the production servers over. "Oh, yeah, we had a big party after that one," Swaim says. (They threw a tailgate at the next home game of Macon's arena football team, the Macon Knights.)
The 6140 had only one little glitch, according to Swaim: It was reporting that one host bus adapter wasn't working, when in fact it was. Fixing the issue required upgrading the system's microcode, which went off without a hitch. "I was pleasantly surprised," Swaim says. "It shut down very cleanly, and our computers didn't lose any data." He says the switch has been rock-solid ever since.
This kind of situation was exactly why nondisruptive code-load -- a feature McData calls HotCAT -- was critical for Brown & Williamson, Swaim says. "It's a big deal because our windows of opportunity for taking the production environment down are small or nonexistent. That eliminates a lot of planning we would have had to do."
Currently, Brown & Williamson has 30 hosts connected to the SAN. That number is probably going to grow to around 100 at end of 2003, Swaim says, as the company replaces its SCSI-attached storage with Fibre Channel storage. The SAN serves a total of 20 Tbytes in two IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) Shark storage servers and an IBM FastT 700 array. "We think 20 [terabytes] will hold us through the end of 2003," Swaim says.
Brown & Williamson worked with McData and Champion Solutions Group, a systems integrator based in Boca Raton, Fla., to design a migration plan. Basically, Swaim says, he just took the old SAN architecture and duplicated it on the 6064 and 6140 directors.
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