31 July 2010
Saturday
Electrical distributor turns to virtualization
By Beth Pariseau | Sep 15, 2009
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PrintWhen Houston-based electrical equipment distributor Wholesale Electric Supply Co. decided to centralize management of server resources by virtualizing with VMware, it also needed to install a storage-area network (SAN) and I/O virtualization switch to keep infrastructure costs from spiraling.
Bill Fife, director of IT at Wholesale Electric Supply, said he managed to get funding for a new Compellent Technologies Inc. Storage Center storage system and a Xsigo Systems Inc. I/O Director despite the economic downturn last fall.
"A SAN is necessary for [server] virtualization," he said, adding that server virtualization is necessary for cost-effective data center management.
"We currently have our [physical] servers in a server room, not a T4 data center," he said. "As our business grows and we expand our domestic and international scope, keeping systems up 365 days per year becomes of higher importance. In order to have a highly available system, I have to move it into a data center. A centralized SAN and I/O virtualization will allow us to afford a move to a colocation facility by keeping the amount of hardware and cables to an absolute minimum, and cut down on the number of switches to keep electricity demand at a minimum."
Fife first checked out an EMC Corp. SAN, but found EMC storage too expensive. "I couldn't convince myself EMC was a good financial move so I certainly couldn't convince my boss," he said. Reseller CDW Corp. wanted him to talk to a representative from Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co.'s LeftHand Networks, but Fife said he didn't like that LeftHand's iSCSI SAN is based on server hardware.
Compellent, which Fife encountered at a midsized enterprise IT conference, turned his head with its Data Progression, thin provisioning, snapshots and replication software. "That eliminates my need to have third-party [host-based replication] apps replicating database updates between two separate SANs," he said.
The distributor is now running 1U diskless physical servers that boot from SANs at the company's primary location as well as at a secondary DR site. "We can build an ESX boot image, do a local replay and boot almost an infinite number of ESX servers from that," Fife said.
Xsigo I/O virtualization to storage cuts down power and cooling
Wholesale Electric Supply also consolidated the number of I/O cards installed in each physical server to cut down on power. Xsigo's I/O Director sits between physical hosts and the SAN switch. Instead of installing separate physical network interface cards (NICs) for Ethernet and host bus adapters (HBAs) for Fibre Channel (FC), the Xsigo director uses dual InfiniBand adapters to present virtual NICs and FC HBAs to each host.
"For a lot of people who have VMware, one or two network cards aren't enough," said Brian Trudeau, president at Wholesale Electric Supply's local solutions provider, Tradentrix Inc., which helped with the Compellent and Xsigo installations. "I've seen all the way up to six or eight network cards in bigger servers."
This article originally appeared on SearchStorage.com
