C A S E S T U D Y
As the old saying goes, it pays to advertise—if you can reach the right people. At Freeze
LLC, a Minnesota-based online marketing agency, advertising pays because the agency can
target ads to more than 90 million of the right people. Thanks to information found in creative
advertising developed through offers of free computer wallpaper, cell phone ring tones, clip
art samples, and screensavers, the agency has a database of consumers that is tapped by
clients such as Columbia House, Discover Card, and Sears.
“Our livelihood is based on how well we interact with our end-users and our partners, which
requires us to track millions of consumer interactions a day,” said Kyle Ohme, director of
information and technology at Freeze. “Continual database access is essential, as well as
gauging the effectiveness of our services.”
Storage virtualization can be a real advantage for operations
Until recently, Freeze had relied on a 3TB SAN to safeguard information critical to company
operations. But when the number of consumer interactions surpassed 15 million per day,
Ohme realized that he needed to not only increase storage capacity, but also improve
resiliency against the loss of any of that data. “After researching alternatives, we decided
to adopt a virtualized storage system that would take snapshots of important data withou
impacting performance,” Ohme said. “We also decided to add mirroring, which provides
complete redundancy so nothing can interrupt our ability to track consumer interactions
around the clock.”
To accomplish his two objectives, Ohme supplemented the new SAN with two FalconStor
NSS storage virtualization appliances in a redundant configuration.
Consumer data is sent from IBM
®
blade servers through switches to a Sun StorageTek 380
device where it is stored. Data snapshots are stored within the same device, which can
then be reattached to another server to replicate large amounts of this information. Two-tier
backup is provided by a Dell PowerVault tape library and offsite storage via a wide area
network (WAN) link to a Xiotech Magnitude 3D 3000 storage device.
Taking the wrong switching path results in company-wide downtime
“In the long term, given our projections for storage growth, we need a powerful SAN switch
that can scale to support over 100TB of data,” Ohme said. “But in the short term, we needed to
expand our storage from our current SAN to our now 18TB FlexLine 380 disk array controller.
McDATA
®
switches came highly recommended by some of our contacts familiar with storage
virtualization, so we installed two 32-port 4Gbps McDATA Sphereon
™
switches,” he said.
These switches, along with IBM Fibre Channel Switch Modules in the IBM BladeCenter
®
chassis, provide SAN and network-attached storage (NAS) access for eight fully populated
IBM BladeCenter chassis running a mix of Microsoft
®
Windows
®
and Linux
®
operating
systems. But soon after the McDATA switches were installed, the SAN became unreliable.
“The McDATA switches dropped storage randomly, which caused large amounts of lost staff
time and countless hours of after-hours support,” Ohme said. “No matter what we tried, we
could not keep the switches from failing.”
Freeze.com
QLogic SAN Solution Makes
Continuous Data Access Pay Off
Challenge
Ensure data is continuously available for snapshots of consumer
interactions in an 89TB SAN consisting of storage devices,
storage virtualization, and backup systems
Solution
QLogic provided a complete solution for managing information,
including two QLogic
®
4Gbps SANbox
®
5602 and two QLogic
5200 switches that manage a 39TB storage area network (SAN)
composed of one 4Gbps Sun
®
StorageTek
®
FlexLine
™
380 disk
array controller, one Xiotech
®
Magnitude
™
storage device, a
BlueArc Titan storage array, a Dell
™
PowerVault
™
tape library,
and two FalconStor
®
network storage system (NSS) virtualization
appliances; the QLogic graphical user interface (GUI) management
application is used for rapid and intuitive SAN management;
QLogic mezzanine host bus adapters and QLogic Fibre Channel
switch modules also are used throughout the SAN
Result
The two SANbox 5602 switches and other QLogic SAN technology
provide this online marketing agency with uninterrupted access
to information critical to billing and managing online consumer
promotions
“Along with a host of QLogic SAN components, our SANbox 5602 switches are
critical to protecting data that reaches millions of consumers while making stor-
age virtualization for analytics cost-effective and hassle-free.”
– Kyle Ohme, Director of Information and Technology, Freeze LLC
