iSCSI Hikes Its Nielsen Rating

TV ratings company Nielsen Media Research finally considers iSCSI ready for primetime in its heterogenous SAN.

Nielsen is using an Intransa Inc. iSCSI system in its new fourth storage tier, with more gear from Intransa and a second iSCSI vendor -- probably EqualLogic Inc. -- to follow. Nielsen technology strategist Rob Stevenson says he plans to connect iSCSI systems to a virtual tape library for archiving.

Stevenson had to be convinced about IP SANs, though. He always liked the price, but with 1.2 Pbytes (yes, that's petabytes) of research data to store and more than 250 Tbytes per month to back up, he couldnt sacrifice too much performance. After all, without Nielsen’s data, we’d never know how many people watch Desperate Housewives on a given week.

Stevenson considered iSCSI back in September 2003, when Nielsen consolidated its storage system from multiple sites into a 20,000-square-foot data center in Oldsmar, Fla. (see Nielsen Media Research). But he didn’t like the industry buzz he heard about iSCSI at the time: that its performance wasn’t up to snuff, mainly because the drivers were unstable.

“I initially thought iSCSI would be a good solution because of cost,” he says. “Unfortunately, I didn’t hear much good about iSCSI back then. People were very dismissive of it.”When he attended a tradeshow last April, Stevenson talked to bold iSCSI pioneers who had positive experiences with IP SANs (see Panel Prompts iSCSI Love-In). He decided to check it out himself.

“That’s when I first started changing my opinion of iSCSI,” he says. “I didn’t do any lab work until then. I had been looking for a good archive system, and the economics were too compelling to ignore.”

Overall, he says he finds iSCSI easy to set up and use, with an acceptable performance. “I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with iSCSI,” he says. “It’s easy to work with, easy to configure.”

Stevenson likes to use two vendors for each tier of storage. For his archiving tier, he looked at equipment from EqualLogic, Intransa, and LeftHand Networks Inc. LeftHand dropped out of the running because it lacks support for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s (Nasdaq: SUNW) Solaris operating system, and Sun is one of Nielsen's storage vendors. That left Intransas and EqualLogic. Stevenson says they both performed well, and he especially likes Intransa’s clustered architecture because it will make it easy to add storage.

Nielsen has a midrange Intransa IP5500 installed with a higher-capacity (up to 32-Tbyte) IP7500 coming soon (see IP SANs Are Sizzling and Intransa Rolls Out IP SAN). The company also runs an entry-level EqualLogic PSA50E in its lab, and Stevenson says he’s “leaning toward” EqualLogic as his second iSCSI vendor (see EqualLogic Expands SAN Line).One thing: Stevenson doesn’t expect iSCSI to rival Fibre Channel’s performance, at least until affordable 10-Gbit/s Ethernet is available, and that could still be years away. So three tiers of Fibre Channel SANs remain entrenched in Nielsen’s data center. Here's how each is defined:

Equipment from other vendors is on the way, too. Stevenson expects to add a virtual tape library to help facilitate backup. He’s considering hardware from MaXXan Systems Inc. and Copan Systems Inc. to run FalconStor Software Inc. (Nasdaq: FALC) VirtualTape Library (VTL) software (see FalconStor, Copan Partner and MaXXan Unveils New Virtual Tape Systems). Stevenson also plans to connect the virtual tape system to the Intransa IP7500 to create a duplicate data warehouse for his developers to access. To further reduce cost in his data center, Stevenson is keeping his eye on SATA II and SAS drives -- both expected later this year (see Report: SATA & SAS to Share Systems and Interoperability Lab Plugs SAS).

Nielsen uses AppIQ Inc. StorageAuthority Suite to manage the data across tiers, mainly because it's based on the Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) created by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). (See AppIQ Enhances Family.) “All our tiers have to be SNIA SMI-S compliant and go through testing,” Stevenson says.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch