Small Firm Counts SAN Success

Storage suppliers expect small to medium-sized businesses (a.k.a. SMBs) to jump into networked storage in great numbers, but small companies usually need a compelling reason to take the leap (see Report: SMBs Need SMStorage). The one-woman IT staff at Minnesota accounting firm Wolf Etter and Co. is a case in point.

System administrator Carla Hedding turned to a SAN system from Compellent Technologies Inc. after her firms rapid growth put it constantly on the verge of running out of disk space. She says the company might not have survived the last tax season without making the change.

“Before installing the SAN, I didn’t think we’d make it,” she says. “The previous year, every day was a stress day. Weekends were scary. I was on call and got called a lot. Now I’m on call and don’t get called.”

Wolf Etter has three sites -- company headquarters in Mankato and offices in Minneapolis and Mankato. The firm has around 100 employees and uses four Citrix Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS) servers and a Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Exchange server for financial records and other documents. Before going to a SAN, Hedding underwent a daily ritual of juggling files on each server to make sure there was enough capacity to keep everybody happy.

“I was robbing Peter to pay Paul so everyone had space,” she says. “It was a daily thing. I had to clean up space everyday and hope everybody had enough.”The firm’s IT consultant, Clear North Technologies, suggested a SAN last November on the eve of tax season. Hedding agreed, but insisted on something easy to manage and not too expensive.

Choices were limited. The major storage vendors had yet to deliver the entry-level SANs they’re now pushing hard, and iSCSI had yet to catch on. Hedding considered a couple of SAN startups. She looked at a Xiotech Corp. system, but says she didn't like the pricetag. Then she settled on a Compellent Storage Center because of cost and its modular design with automated management features.

Still, there was trepidation. Wolf Etter was putting its business in the hands of a company that hadn’t even come out of stealth yet (see Compellent Comes Out Selling).

“We had a lot hanging on it,” Hedding says. “If the SAN goes down, everything goes down. There were concerns. Nobody likes to be the first guy. Compellent was new, and we were coming on early.”

But like many SMBs, Wolf Etter puts a lot of faith in its consultants. The firm has worked with Clear North for nine years, and Clear North was among the channel partners Compellent lined up before it even went public with its SANs.Wolf Etter installed a one-controller system with 1 Tbyte of Fibre Channel disk capacity. One problem: It took Hedding a little time to figure out how to properly use snapshots for backup.

“At first, you think ‘It’s a cool toy -- do them all the time.’ I was going overboard. But you learn.” For a few weeks after installing the SAN, Hedding did snapshots every 10 minutes, but reached a saturation point. “Everything locked up at 5 o’clock one afternoon,” she remembers. “Nothing would boot, the SAN was full. We cleaned up what we could, put in new drives, and restored from our snapshots. It took less than three hours for the whole process. Without snapshots, we would have had to fully restore, and we would have lost an entire day of work.”

Now she does snapshots every day at noon. Those snapshots, combined with backups to her Spectra Logic Corp. tape library, cover the firm without crashing the SAN.

These days, Hedding's work life is considerably easier. Weekends are no longer spent helping find more disk space for harried accountants. And she's already thinking about the next move. “We’re talking about putting a SAN at one of our other sites and replicating, or adding another controller."

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch0