Texas College Majors in DR

In the wake of last year's hurricane season, one college in Houston devised a setup that banks on new Overland Storage tape libraries and Intransa IP SANs to give its IT staff peace of mind.

Billy Vaughn, IT operations manager of San Jacinto College put together a three-pronged DR strategy after Hurricane Rita tore through the area last September. The community college in Harris County, Texas, didn't suffer any damage, but the close shave drove home the importance of a DR plan.

"Since the last hurricane season, I've been very disaster minded," Vaughn says. "I had been quite worried about backup. Last hurricane season threw us into a panic. That's one thing I dont have to worry about this year."

Vaughn set up a disaster recovery site in Austin after the hurricanes and installed a new tape library in the main data center, a smaller library in the DR site, and IP SANs at both sites for replication.

Part of the backup overhaul had to do with a need for greater efficiency. Data was growing rapidly at the college due to a decision to give all 73,000 students their own account with roaming profiles, and backups were taking too long.Hurricanes were the primary concern. The school's tape library was in the main campus data center, with an offsite tape vault eight miles away. There was a good chance a hurricane could knock both out. So San Jacinto set up a disaster recovery site in Austin where it could replicate data and install a second tape library.

First, San Jacinto had to replace its Qualstar tape library, which Vaughn says "didn't have a lot of reliability. It was aging. It was LTO-1 and I wanted to go to LTO-3. I needed to look at enterprise libraries that supported native Fibre Channel. Qualstar was SCSI with a Fibre Channel bridge, and performance suffered."

Vaughn looked at libraries from Overland Storage, SpectraLogic, and Sun/StorageTek. He liked SpectraLogic's RXT Sabre platform combining disk and tape, "but I couldn't come close to affording that."

He settled on an Overland NEO 8000 LTO-3 system with a list price of around $75,500 because of "functionality and price."

The next step was getting a SAN for replication. San Jacinto had an old StorageTek Fibre Channel SAN, but Vaughn wanted an iSCSI system to keep down costs.He spoke to dedicated IP SAN vendors Intransa and LeftHand Networks, and looked at iSCSI offerings from EMC, Network Appliance, and Sun. Well, he tried to look at iSCSI systems from the predominantly Fibre Channel vendors.

"I spent six months sorting through IP SANS," he says. "Intransa was the only one that could show us a true iSCSI enterprise system. The others had a Fibre Channel backbone with an iSCSI interface. We didn't want people selling us Fibre Channel with an IP interface. A couple of the vendors told us, 'You're not getting full speed from Fibre Channel.' Well, we weren't looking for Fibre Channel speed."

San Jacinto installed a dual-controller Intransa IP3000 with 12 Tbytes, and another in the Austin DR site with 6 Tbytes for replication. Vaughn says Intransa won out over LeftHand because he found it easier to add capacity to the Intransa system.

"If you're only going to use LeftHand with 4 TBytes without expanding, that's great," he says. "But the long-term TCO is much better with Intransa. It's easier to expand, and just as fast and reliable."

Vaughn went back to Overland to complete his DR strategy, picking an ARCVault 24 rack-optimized library the vendor announced today. (See Overland Unveils ARCvault.) The new Overland library -- formerly code named "Dreadnought" -- is aimed at SMBs but Vaughn says it has enterprise value in the right situation."Why does an enterprise need an ARCvault?" he asks. "If my tape library gets hit, I would have to take it to Austin for backup. I needed a tape drive out there. A standalone LTO-3 drive is very expensive. The ARCvault is almost the same list price [$7,369] as a standalone LTO-3 drive. I have automation built in, and it fits in a 2U drive. But I hope I never have to use that. It's a worse-case scenario for me."

Some would say San Jacinto is courting disaster with its pick of vendors. Intransa is a startup and Overland is trying to revamp its product line around disk and SMB tape libraries after losing an enterprise library OEM deal with Hewlett-Packard last year. (See Tom Alexander, CEO, Intransa, Overland Preps More Low-End Tape, and Overland Grabs New Partner.) Vaughn says he picked the vendors for service and reliability.

"I don't look at a company's financials, I look at support and price," he says. "Service is important to us, especially during an outage. I can't afford to lose a tape drive on the spot. I only had to use Overland's support once, and it wasn't a library issue."

— Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch