Morris, Schneider & Prior

The IT group at an Atlanta law firm has replaced a Xiotech SAN with one from Pillar, bypassing EMC and HP solutions and adding speed and boot-from-SAN efficiency in the process.

Josh Burnley, director of information systems at Morris, Schneider & Prior LLC (MSP), says it became obvious late last year the firm had outgrown its five-year-old Xiotech Magnitude system. MSP primarily represents financial services firms in mortgage foreclosure, bankruptcy, commercial litigation, collections, and other real estate cases. Burnley says the firm's data is image-intensive and fills up disk space rapidly.

"When we first bought the Xiotech, we thought, 'Two terabytes, that's going to take us forever to fill,' " Burnley says. "Well, we were down to 50 gigs left on our SAN when we decided to upgrade. We had major need for growth on the storage side. We also needed better performance. Our backup times were too slow."

With 305 users at the firm's Atlanta headquarters and more than 30 remote sites throughout the Southeast, the Magnitude was no longer adequate to support MSP's case management and document management databases and email archive.

When the firm decided to upgrade, Burnley and his staff looked at Xiotech's newer Magnitude 3D SAN, as well as midrange EMC Clariion, Hewlett-Packard EVA, and Pillar Axiom midrange systems. (See Xiotech Gives Magnitude a Tuneup.) Burnley says performance, ease of use, and price were his key criteria."Xiotech had a good easy interface to carve out space, so we didn't want to get into this complicated system for administration," Burnley says. "And we didn't, because the Pillar system is also easy. The EMC and HP interfaces were not as easy to learn."

As a Xiotech customer, MSP was not averse to buying from smaller vendors. Still, it took some convincing from Pillar with its talk of slammers (controllers), bricks (disk enclosures), and software that places data on disk according to how frequently it's accessed. Also, Burnley had his reservations about SATA drives, which are the only type Pillar offers.

"We were used to Fibre Channel drives, and moving to SATA drives was a leap of faith for us," he says. "Pillar told us how their software would arrange data on a disk in a way that gained significant speed. But we had the mentality that Fibre Channel's the best, and you can't get faster than a Fibre Channel drive. So we were skeptical."

Burnley says once his team began running performance tests, they noticed significant speed increases. We put Pillar through the wringer during testing," he says. "We are a transaction-based business. We need speed to stay ahead of the curve.”

Burnley also liked Pillar's price tag, both for the initial system and for upgrades. He says MSP paid Pillar $95,000 for a 12-Tbyte system two 16-port Brocade switches. "And if I need more space, I make a phone call, buy a brick, pop it in, and it's ready to be provisioned," he says. "No licenses, none of that stuff. With the other vendors you have to pay licenses on top of the cost of the hard drive."He says Xiotech would have charged around $70,000 to upgrade to 4 Tbytes. "We ended up paying $95,000 for 12 terabytes and two new switches."

A benefit Burnley hadn't counted on was the ability to add servers that boot directly off the SAN without disk. MSP boots though a QLogic HBA that connects servers directly to the SAN. Burnley says that makes it easier to load new servers, employ patches, and recover from a second server if one fails.

"When we add a server now, Pillar's caching takes five minutes to load the server from a CD. Five minutes, and you're sitting there with a new server. Before it would take about 30 to 60 minutes," he says.

Burnley's shop started doing snapshots after installing the Axiom, enabling disaster recovery in conjunction with booting off the SAN. "When we add a drive to the SAN, we make a snapshot of that drive and copy it over to another part of the SAN," Burnley says. "We apply patches, updates, and if something goes wrong, I copy that other drive back from the snapshot and put it into place." He hopes to start replicating soon, but he is still searching for a colocation site.

On the downside, Burnley's also looking to make upgrades to his Pillar system without downtime. That's not possible, he says, until Pillar upgrades its software. "Their one downfall now is to make an upgrade to the SAN you have to take the system down and reboot," Burnley says. "They're promising that goes away in version 2.0 of their software. Then you'll be able to upgrade half the system while the other half runs in production, so you can upgrade without downtime."Pillar claims it will have that upgrade in the fall.

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch