Council opts for integrated storage system

By ADAM GIIFORD

Waitakere City Council has invested in a $350,000 storage area network (SAN) to cope with the increasing amounts of data being produced by its systems.

The CLARiiON storage system from storage giant EMC will go live at the end of February.

Council information technology manager Simon Leigh said more than 500Mb of data was being added a month because of its enterprise system and greater use of digital imaging and multimedia files.

"Our EcoWater business unit is preparing to use closed-circuit TV cameras to assess the condition of sewer pipes. This will generate large video files, to be stored on the network and linked into asset management database systems," Mr Leigh said.

He said the council, the country's fifth largest, recognised it was running out of storage space in 1998, and evaluated its options.

Its Sun Sparc storage array could no longer handle on its own the volume of production data coming out of the Gems enterprise business system, and capacity issues were emerging with its NT servers.

"We wanted to move to a single integrated platform to drive management and support costs down, rather than continue to pursue single host-attached solutions," Mr Leigh said.

"Rather than do the tactical thing and throw extra disk at these boxes, we developed a more holistic strategy to move into storage area networking over a two- to three-year period."

An SAN is built around a fibre channel switch, which allows servers connected to the network to access the central pool of data at high speed and with high reliability and availability. Because it uses both NT and Unix computing platforms, Waitakere was looking for vendor neutrality. It also wanted end-to-end fibre channel connectivity.

"SANs were very much a promise back in 1998 - there were no ratified standards. We looked at offerings from our incumbent suppliers as well as the wider market and conducted our own analysis according to weighted attributes," Mr Leigh said.

"We awarded more points for an end-to-end fibre channel solution as opposed to fibre channel bridge talking to SCSI-based disks, which was what the majority of vendors were offering at that time."

CLARiiON is EMC's mid-range offering, based on technology which came when it bought Data General. Mr Leigh said about half of the council's servers, those with high storage requirements, were being put on the SAN.

When it goes live next month it will contain about half a terabyte of data, and can scale up to 3.6 terabytes without a serious system upgrade.

"That's the whole point - it's easy to just throw more disk at it until you reach the limit the cabinet can hold."

Once the basic SAN is operational, the council will add a SAN-attached tape back-up so it can do back-ups without affecting the performance of its local area network.

Waitakere City Council has 16 NT servers for file print and application services and a Sun E4000 that hosts Gems (Government Enterprise Management System).