Construction Company Rebuilds IT Infrastructure

Ken Marsh knows stress. He once worked as a 911 dispatcher.

But now as the IT manager for construction company T.B. Penick & Sons, San Diego, Calif., he recalls coming into the office to find a line of people waiting outside his door. The network was down and they couldn't get e-mail.

After too many mornings like that, Marsh convinced his boss to spend the money to upgrade the company's data center. In addition to seven servers with Windows 2003 with dual Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange and a couple of SQL servers, Marsh said the IP-SAN they implemented at the same time provides the connectivity among the servers and has vastly improved performance.

Penick has three divisions: construction and contracting; structural concrete; and innovative concrete surfaces. Marsh said his users are all over the country often in remote areas or traveling for weeks at a time. "So everybody has to have [network] access to company info and to get e-mail," he said.

Penick's headcount isn't huge, but it was enough to keep Marsh, then a one-man IT department, hopping. Through acquisitions, he went from 40 to 80 users in 18 months. They were all on two NT 4.0 servers, one with Citrix Server that itinerant users accessed to create a remote desktop. The other server was running Exchange and everything else."After we doubled in size the environment became unstable and servers were having trouble," Marsh said. With the innovative concrete division's reliance on images and digitized photos, databases filled up very quickly with big chunks of data. "If one application had a problem, we had to restart the servers. It affected everyone." Penick's growth has continued; he now supports 120 users and 150 machines internally.

Backup was also problematic; using tape drives that held 27 Gbytes was getting too cumbersome to manage. "It was really hard to defrag the drives because I was running out of space--and my vendor at the time just kept telling me to add another drive," Marsh explained. "I didn't see an end in sight to the management problems."

In May 2003, Marsh brought in Networks Plus, a systems integrator. "We told them, 'Make us more reliable, create more redundancy and get us into the 21st century," Marsh said. While he had never heard of IP-SANs, Networks Plus was very bullish on them and invited Marsh to examine their installation.

He thought it was an ideal fit for Penick, so in June 2003, the company got an IP-SAN, consisting of two Storage Concentrator i2000s from StoneFly Networks for redundancy and failover; a Nexsan ATAboy2 RAID storage; a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch from Dell; and six Microsoft and Intel iSCSI initiators. Penick also installed dual active directories running ShadowCopy to take two snapshots each day of all server files.

Marsh the company spent about $30,000 for the IP-SAN, and the servers, power arrays, switches and Windows upgrade were about $200,000. He estimated the installation will save the company at least $10,000 per year.In the meantime, Marsh said backups have been greatly improved. The IP-SAN does backup to tape and hard drives for offsite storage, and there's a complete 350-Gbyte backup of all seven servers on Friday nights, and then does incremental backups during the week"10 to 20 minutes per night, he said.

"We thought we had bit off a lot with 2.5 TBytes of storage space on the SAN," Marsh said, adding that the additional capacity gives him more breathing room when it's time to back up 350 GBytes. One thing he'd like to change is the way capacity gets doled out by the system. "If I have a 500-GByte user volume and I don't have enough left over to do a defrag, it would be nice to make it 600 GBytes, rather than add on another 500 GByte," Marsh said.

The system has been up for about six months and Marsh predicted it will be at least a year before he needs to add another array. "It's nice to not have users lined up at my front door," Marsh said. "That's allowed me to do other things that I always intended to do."

This story originally appeared on storagepipeline.com.