Safety Services Firm Strengthens SAN

Fire and safety services provider Fire Materials Group spent millions over the past two years to turn a fledgling IT infrastructure into a "fire proof" data center.

Tempe, Ariz.-based Fire Materials Group offers services that ensure its clients' sprinkler systems, alarms, and fire extinguishers are regularly inspected and comply with governmental regulations. Its data center also services TVA Fire and Life Safety, a San Diego-based consulting and engineering firm spun out of FMG in 2001.

Fire Materials' data availability is crucial because it is contractually obligated to respond to any failure in a customer's safety system within four hours. According to CIO Charles Brown, the company deals mostly with Fortune 500 firms specializing in what he calls "big box retail" -- department and home furnishing stores. It services nearly 37,000 locations spread throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Latin America.

But Brown says when he arrived at Fire Materials, its IT infrastructure was hardly adequate for the task. There was no redundancy, one data center, and no functional networked storage.

"When I joined in March 2004, our IT director had a desk in a closet, four servers, and about 400 gigs of storage capacity," Brown says.Now the data center is pushing 100 servers, 7 Tbytes of storage on a SAN, and a colocation site in Deer Valley, Ariz. with servers that host critical business applications and provide real-time backup. Just for good measure, the firm has satellite backup systems in its San Diego and Atlanta facilities. There's also an ongoing voice-over IP (VOIP) rollout, a five-person development team, and plans to turn Atlanta into a third data center.

The bill for all that? About $2 million, says Brown. But it was necessary to compete better against Tyco-owned SimplexGrinnel in what the CIO calls a "David and Goliath situation." He says Fire Materials has already achieved its ROI by expanding its customer base and maintaining a 98 percent customer retention rate. Brown maintains that Fire Materials has had no downtime since installing the SAN, and estimates it can grow its business tenfold without adding new IT infrastructure beyond what's already in the works.

The SAN plays a big role in that. Fire Materials uses its SAN to store and back up its inspection records, system design drawings, customer service histories, customer equipment records, maintenance data, all Exchange email, and other Windows applications. That doesn't leave much out.

"We had a legacy [pre-Clariion] Dell SAN that we inherited from our San Diego office," Brown says. "That SAN was never completely deployed, it was just dysfunctional. It couldn't accommodate our Exchange requirements or replicate any core applications."

Fire Materials hired reseller CDW to help it beef up its SAN and other data center equipment last year. Fire Materials considered a Dell Clariion while CDW brought in a lineup of SAN contenders that included midrange systems from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and startup LeftHand Networks. Fire Materials chose two Network Storage Module (NSM) systems from LeftHand, the only iSCSI system in the group. (See LeftHand Picks Up iSCSI and LeftHand Launches SATA Platform.)Brown says LeftHand's system costs far below the Fibre Channel contenders, but that wasn't its only selling point. He likes that it was also easier to set up and manage than the Fibre Channel SANs. That was key because Fire Materials' IT group didn't have a lot of storage experience. He also wanted a system that works well with Windows because, as Brown says, "We run the flag up and bow to the west twice a day to salute Microsoft."

But while Fire Materials' IT staff knew Windows, it didn't know much about storage outside of its ill-fated earlier SAN.

"We knew enough to know what we didn't know," Brown says. "We said, 'Let's see the technologies out there and select something that fell into our financial reach.' IP gave us the most flexibility across multiple servers and applications. We did not go into that process as experts."

He says LeftHand was the only storage vendor that made specific SLAs. It took merely five hours to deploy the systems and LeftHand's SAN/IQ Remote Copy replication software. The original plan was to replicate data between the two SANs in-house for 90 days and monitor performance until the Deer Valley site was ready. But when the site became available 45 days early, "we were comfortable enough to pull the trigger and deploy to the colocation facility the first day it was available. It was seamless," Brown adds. "We rolled the racks in, plugged everything in, lit up our connections, and we were rolling."

Along with the disk backup, Fire Materials sends data to tape using Symantec Backup Exec and Exabyte tape libraries for offsite archiving.The next step is to set up another colocation site, probably in Atlanta for strategic reasons. "We want a third facility, and right now we're thinking the eastern seaboard is a good place," Brown says. "That gives us a portal to Europe. This will also give us more redundancy, and the facility will probably be our second hub in the VOIP solution we're getting ready to roll out for all our locations."

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch