Insurer Open to Change

Priority Health goes to great lengths with its SANs to insure its data is safe.

The health insurance provider has a sizable SAN environment: three Hewlett-Packard EVA 500s, two HP XP12000s (rebranded Hitachi Data System TagmaStores), and two HP MSA1500s, and last summer switched from Brocade switches to Cisco directors. The Grand Rapids, Mich., firm runs two autonomous SANs with segregated fabrics so it never has to shut down its production system.

Jake Roersma, manager of network engineering, says he has 74 Tbytes of data and hes constantly adding disk to keep up with 28 percent to 30 percent annual growth.

And what’s he doing for storage resource management (SRM)?

“Excel spreadsheets,” he says, dismissing SRM as "hit or miss." Many vendors will support some arrays but not others, or some parts of those arrays, but it's never a complete package. "Here’s the way storage management should work: You should pre-allocate it, click a button, and it does it the allocation automatically. That would take a huge burden off a SAN administrator’s plate."Roersma has found a tool to lift much of that burden in Onaro’s SANScreen change management software. (See Onaro Ships Change Manager.) Onaro isn’t really SRM; it doesn’t let you provision or allocate storage, configure logical unit numbers (LUNs), or monitor utilization. But it does track changes made to the SAN, and provides what-if scenarios that help administrators plan for adding or deleting gear.

“When you update LUN zones, people want to know, ‘Did anything change two weeks ago?’ Excel spreadsheets won’t tell you that,” Roersma explains. “With Onaro we could roll back and say, ‘On this day, these are the actual changes that happened.’ We know when a change is implemented, it is implemented correctly.”

Still, Roersma wishes he had one more button to push with SANScreen.

“If you’re doing pre-allocation for verification, it wouldn’t hurt to have the product actually allocate the storage. Now you set it up under Onaro templates, do pre-allocation, zone in your host, you verify it, and it sits there. Then you have to go out and perform those steps. You’re still going into the devices manually.”

Still, Roersma thinks Onaro’s change management capabilities helped him avoid headaches last summer when he performed a dreaded switch rip-and-replace. Roersma decided he wanted to upgrade to directors from 32-port Brocade SilkWorm switches but he liked Cisco’s directors better than Brocade’s. He migrated from Brocade to two MDS 9509 128-port directors and six 32-port MDS 9216i multiprotocol switches.Roersma says Cisco’s switch architecture gives him more flexibility. For instance, he can use the Ethernet ports on the 9216i to attach iSCSI storage and possibly add an IP SAN eventually. Plus, he expects easier upgrades to 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel and 10-Gbit/s Ethernet when the time is right.

“I felt like Cisco’s approach to Fibre Channel was a little better. The way Cisco came out was, ‘it’s just another protocol.’ And it’s true. Brocade has the mentality that Fibre Channel’s on a special pedestal and Cisco said, ‘We’re going to integrate all these protocols into one suite.' ”

He expected the change would have its share of challenges, though. Instead, he completed the migration in one day. But because Priority runs autonomous SANs he moved one at a time while leaving the other one up. Still, a lot could have gone wrong.

“With hundreds of ports, and the amount of zoning and complexity of VSANs [virtual SANs], it was very helpful for us to look ahead and use Onaro to verify our configuration."

“We used the Onaro feature where you can set up what-if scenarios. We used that before we allocated storage. We could put in what devices we were adding, and Onaro and it validated the changes.”Change management also comes in handy when Priority adds disk, which it has to do a lot to keep up with HIPAA compliance requirements.

“When you add disk, Onaro sees what it changed in the overall scheme of things. It sees LUN, worldwide names, anything you do in fabric, it will see.”

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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