C A S E S T U D Y
Schindler
Group
QLogic 6140 Router Elevates
Enterprise Application
Deployment
Challenge
Find a way to lower the cost and speed up the testing of
new enterprise software in a SAN environment.
Solution
The QLogic
®
SANbox
®
6140 Intelligent Storage Router
provides inexpensive server access to a SAN using iSCSI
over existing Ethernet cabling. The test SAN consists of
a 1TB Hitachi Data Systems
®
Thunder 9500
™
V Series
Modular Storage Array and a Hewlett-Packard
®
ProLiant
®
DL360 server running Red Hat
®
Enterprise Linux
®
Result
By using the QLogic SANbox 6140 Intelligent Storage
Router, the time to conduct proof-of-concept tests
dropped from over a week to a day and a half. The
improved productivity allowed IT staff to use personnel
resources more effectively. New applications can be
deployed to customers faster and with less impact on
the busy IT department
“The QLogic SANbox 6140 Intelligent Storage Router gives us a rapid and cost-ef-
fective way to test new enterprise applications in a SAN environment, which helps
us get new software applications to our users faster.”
—Ed Torres, Data Center Manager, The Schindler Group
Following the introduction of their first electric elevator in Lucerne, Switzerland,
in 1890, and with a company history dating all the way back to 1874, the
Schindler Group today is one of the oldest and most successful providers of
transportation systems, elevators, and escalators in the entire world.
And like every large business in the world today, IT management has become
an essential component to maintaining the company’s competitive edge.
Maximizing the efficiency of 3,000 mobile employees across the United States
is just one of the ways the Schindler Group can stay ahead of the game. As
Ed Torres, data center manager for North American operations, noted, “New
applications need to work reliably when we deploy them to our maintenance
technicians and field sales representatives. Otherwise, we will not see the
productivity benefits. That requires a lot of testing on our part, which can be
expensive and time-consuming.”
Torres recently sought to cut the cost of testing while also reducing the time
spent testing so applications could be deployed to the field even faster. “Our
proof-of-concept test environment was composed of expensive Brocade
®
SilkWorm
®
switches with Fibre Channel connections between the servers and
the SAN,” he said. “But configuration complexity caused testing to take weeks
and consume the time of key IT staff members. We needed to find a better,
faster way to accelerate the deployment of new applications.”
Schindler moves to QLogic router
It was clear to Torres that simplifying the test environment was the place to
begin. “We knew that moving from Fibre Channel to iSCSI would bring down
connectivity costs as well as reduce the labor involved in configuring the test
environment,” Torres said.
After reviewing alternative iSCSI SAN routers, Torres decided to evaluate the
QLogic SANbox 6140 Intelligent Storage Router. “It looked like the QLogic
router configuration wizard would simplify SAN management and save staff
time,” Torres said. “We were also impressed by the responsiveness of QLogic
in answering our questions.”