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Elevator Company Takes Fibre Channel To The Top: Page 3 of 3

So how do companies like Minnesota Elevator, with their storage bursting at the seams, decide whether to go with more DASD, Fibre Channel, iSCSI or network-attached storage? Companies typically select their storage architecture based on their application requirements, their IT staff's comfort level with Fibre Channel, data availability and performance, budget and their long-term strategy, said Nancy Marrone-Hurley, senior analyst for Enterprise Storage Group, Portland, Ore.

Minnesota Elevator's SAN sped up retrieval time for its larger CAD files by about 30 percent. But it wasn't just a matter of plug and play. Minnesota Elevator's SAN nearly got stuck on the ground floor when during its initial testing, it couldn't add drives to its Windows servers when it began partitioning the disk space.

Burns said the problem turned out to be a flaw in how Windows handles so-called dynamic or expandable disks, where you can create additional disk space without destroying your existing data. The company had to convert the drives in Windows to dynamic first. Then it could expand the drives, he said.

Minnesota Elevator now is looking at disk-to-disk backup for nearline storage. "As we continue to grow, we have more data and the smaller our backup window gets," Burns said.