Law Firm Ditches NAS, Saves Cash

Sometimes, more means less: Law firm Bowman and Brooke has shaved more than $300,000 off its IT costs over the last couple of years, despite experiencing an eight-fold increase in data.

Randall Vogsland, infrastructure supervisor at the Minneapolis-based firm, told Byte and Switch that back in 2004, with just over 2 Tbytes of data, the firm was almost at its storage limit. At that time, the company's storage comprised the internal disk drives within 46 Compaq DL360 servers and a half dozen Quantum NAS devices. The servers and NAS devices, he adds, were spread across six separate sites.

Vogsland's group decided to ease the strain on its servers by deploying a Magnitude storage system from Xiotech at each of the six sites in early 2004. That turned out to be just in time for a data explosion prompted by clients' compliance pressures and increasing use of multimedia by the firm's lawyers.

"Now we're closer to about 16 Tbytes and we have the [potential] for a lot more than that," explains Vogsland, adding that the six SAN boxes offer a total of 25 Tbytes.

Vogsland also saved money by moving away from internal server storage -- and away from NAS. "I don't need to buy disks, I don't need to buy [disk] upgrades, and I don't need to buy RAID controllers," he explains, adding that this has probably saved over $125,000 since 2004. "Then you can lob in around another $200,000 just for the labor cost saving."The other big benefit is the ability to do more with hardware than assign it to a specific server or servers. "Ninety percent of the reason why we decided to move to a SAN environment was the flexibility it offered in allocating our storage," says Vogsland.

The degree of flexibility in a SAN system quickly became a differentiator for Vogsland. He says he chose Xiotech after looking at EMC's Clariion, as well as offerings from Compellent and 3PAR. "The primary reason that we settled on Xiotech was their virtualization engine and the simplicity of management [they offered]," adds the exec. "Everyone has the virtualization engine, but we just felt that Xiotech were further along and had a more mature engine."

The market for midrange SAN systems, such as the Magnitude devices, is heating up at the moment, thanks largely to falling disk drive prices and the availability of technologies such as virtualization, which have traditionally been found on higher-end gear. (See Midrange Makes Its Move.)

Vogsland deploys the Magnitudes in all six of the firm's sites, which are spread coast to coast across the U.S. According to the exec, Fibre Channel drives make up about 80 percent of his storage, with Serial ATA accounting for the remaining 20 percent.

Vogsland won't reveal how much he paid for the Xiotech boxes, although prices for the largest of the six devices, a Magnitude 3000s in Minneapolis, and a Magnitude 3000e in Phoenix, start at around $84,000 and $43,000, respectively. He hints that he got a deal. "None of the vendors stayed static in their initial pricing," he adds.But Vogsland says that there is still room for improvement, and he is keen to see Xiotech enhance its virtualization story. "Scaling down the capacity of a virtual disk is less straightforward than I would like," he says. "I would like the option to reclaim some of the space on virtual disks that we're not using."

At the moment, Bowman and Brooke's six storage devices are not directly connected to each other, although Vogsland says the firm uses the built-in replication features of Windows servers located at each site to transfer data.

Vogsland's group would like to link up their Xiotech boxes. "As it gets to the point where the business needs that, or it's cost effective, I would absolutely love to do that," he says. "There are certain Fibre offerings that can do that, there's devices that can transfer Fibre into long-haul Ethernet," he adds.

But Vogsland concedes that at this stage, connecting his islands of SAN is something of a pipe-dream. "I know that the technology is not in the price range of our business needs," he says.

Since upgrading its storage, Bowman and Brooke has also overhauled its server infrastructure, replacing most of the Compaq boxes with 42 IBM xSeries 335 and 336 servers. "We got the hardware at a good price," he explains, adding that the IBM boxes also offer better out-of-band management than the Compaq devices.James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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