C A S E S T U D Y
Nashville Wire
Products
QLogic Data Mirroring Protects
Critical Data Cost-Effectively
Challenge
Improve data center resiliency to a storage failure by
mirroring data at two locations without incurring the
high cost of traditional data protection approaches.
Solution
Two QLogic
®
SANbox
®
6142 Intelligent Storage Routers
support mirrored storage between two locations; the
QLogic router at the primary location is connected using
Fibre Channel to an IBM
®
System Storage DS4300 SAN;
that router also connects via a high-speed FCIP link to a
second identical QLogic router located 14 miles away,
and has a Fibre Channel connection to an IBM DS4100
disk storage system.
Result
With two QLogic SANbox 6142 Intelligent Storage
Routers used to mirror data from one location to another,
equipment prices are 80 percent below other storage
synchronization products. In the event of storage failure,
data can be accessed over a wide-area link, maintaining
access to critical business applications.
“When we began discussions with Nashville Wire, it was clear they
needed a trusted advisor to help them arrive at the right solution and
stay within budget,” said Nick DeMaria, Solutions Architect for QLogic
Corporation. “Steve Moore, our local Systems Engineer and I brought the
experience and knowledge of Best Practices for SAN deployment to the
table to share with them and together we managed to hit upon the ideal
way to tackle their technology challenge.”
Nashville Wire Products, a leading manufacturer of wire decking, dividers,
and accessories for storage racks, has 11 offices throughout Tennessee, all
accessing a central data center at a co-location facility. But the company’s
system architecture had single points of failure. “Because our whole company
relies on the one data center, we wanted to improve the system’s resiliency to
storage system failures. Without access to critical applications, such as our
ERP system, our business would slow to a crawl,” said Megan Meier, Nashville
Wire’s network administrator.
To avoid this possibility, the IT staff decided to set up a mirrored storage
system at the company’s headquarters. The mirrored system would be
maintained in sync with the primary storage system, so no data would be
lost in the case of a failure. “In the event of storage system failure, we could
take the secondary storage system to the co-location site and restart the
applications. The interruption to our business would be minimal,” Meier
explained.
Price point makes the difference as Nashville
Wire considers data backup system
When Meier researched the options available to mirror storage across a wide
area network, she experienced sticker shock. “We received recommendations
for dedicated storage synchronization products that cost up to $30,000 per
location. That was just way beyond our budget,” explained Meier.
Meier knew of QLogic’s reputation for high-quality, low-cost routers, and
she sought the company out. She found that a pair of QLogic 6142 SANbox
Intelligent Storage Routers costs just one sixth that of other approaches.
“We were really excited because at that price point, we could implement
the storage mirroring project,” Meier said. “We would never have been able
to afford to mirror storage across two locations without the use of QLogic
routers—it would simply have been cost-prohibitive.”
