Alliance Systems

As a server manufacturer, Dallas-based Alliance Systems finds itself with cheap and easy access to servers and software licenses.

And that was the problem for systems administrator Darren McDonald. He watched Alliance go from 25 servers when he arrived in late 2003 to 40 servers six months later. The setup encompassed 3 Tbytes of direct attached storage, and managing it became a pain.

"Every server had a dedicated application it was supporting... We realized we need a lot more storage than we thought."

Alliance did have a small Adaptec Fibre Channel SAN, but that didn't solve problems caused by server sprawl. Last summer, McDonald went shopping for a larger SAN with plans of virtualizing storage and servers.

"First, one of our VARs brought us a large HP [EVA] SAN," he says. "When we saw the price tag, we almost fell over. We heard about NetApp filers, they're simple to install, simple to upkeep and maintain, but the price tag was still up there."Alliance purchased two OnStor Bobcat NAS gateways last July that list for around $25,000 apiece. The company added a Dot Hill SAN array in August and recently purchased another Dot Hill SAN for a total of 4 Tbytes.

At the same time, Alliance purchased VMware software to configure virtual servers.

Although Adaptec and Dot Hill sell mostly through OEMs, Alliance bought their storage direct because they are business partners. McDonald selected OnStor because it works with any storage -- unlike the major NAS vendors -- and he liked the price. (See ONStor Hits NAS Gas.)

OnStor's gateways let McDonald build a file server cluster with multiple virtual servers via VMware on his SAN. (See Special Report: NAS Clustering and Virtualization .) "On the front end... you can replace a server overnight and nobody would know," he says. "We can put any storage behind it. We choose our [SAN] partners because of price, and because our in-house engineers have knowledge of their products."

Alliance still has 40 servers, but McDonald considers that a victory because he stemmed the growth. Still, for a company with 130 employees worldwide and 75 in its Dallas headquarters, he expects to reduce that number by at least half with the help of VMware virtual servers and clusters. "I have a vision that we're ultimately going to reduce down to a dozen servers, mostly by clustering SQL servers," he says.McDonald says the consolidation doesn't save much money because Alliance uses its own servers and doesnt pay for software licenses as a Microsoft partner. The real savings is in management headaches and time.

"They don't care if I work 60 or 80 hours a week, I still get paid the same," McDonald says. "But I care. If we were a typical business that had to purchase servers and software licenses, our savings numbers would be more impressive. But we're still saving money, because at the rate we were going we were going to have to expand our data center."

McDonald says he's still waiting for OnStor to live up to one of its promises.

"We were told iSCSI is coming," he says. "We were looking forward to it, and we're still looking forward to it. Now you have either DAS or Fibre Channel storage. Some apps and backups will not work through URLs or shared paths, and mapping a drive will not provide the solution you need."

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and SwitchOrganizations mentioned in this article: