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Making the Switch to iSCSI Storage
1/31/2008
iSCSI, which was built to run in an Ethernet environment, was suddenly on the table. With a modest emergency budget of about $40,000, a group consisting of executive director George Sherman, e-mail administrators Ralph Romanelli and Tony Hong, as well as Farr, started a search for a replacement SAN strategy by viewing vendor webinars. The choices quickly were whittled down to SANs offered by LeftHand Networks and those offered by another manufacturer.
The school chose LeftHand, said Farr, for two reasons: It could buy storage in smaller increments; and each unit is a separate entity, which means that if one goes down, the others presumably will continue running. The initial purchase included three entry-level LeftHand NSM 160 storage units along with five QLogic fibre channel host bus adapters (HBAs) to use with legacy servers that lacked gigabit capabilities.
The new hardware was delivered in December and installed early in January. Farr said it was well documented and had a small learning curve. The only real obstacle--a tiny one--surfaced when the on site installers failed to check for a new version of LeftHand's SAN/iQ software, which had come out about a month earlier and included a slightly modified interface.
Since that initial installation, the school has purchased three additional LeftHand units. "It was easy to add them right into the cluster," said Farr. "As soon as they were plugged in, [the system] started replicating to the new units."
Also, although bandwidth usage really never goes much above half a gigabit, the school has noticed a considerably reduced time for doing backups with iSCSI devices.
Eventually, Queensborough will unplug its existing fibre channel solution, once a few lingering applications are moved to the newer storage system.
Best of all, the new setup works. One day, when Farr was "playing" with a configuration on one of the IBM blades, he inadvertently disconnected it from the network. "Since it boots off the SAN, it couldn't see the boot." Farr cranked up the SAN snapshot ability, went "back" in time, rebooted the server, and up it came. Operations didn't go down; they failed over to another blade as they should. "It actually worked," said Farr. "Just like in the commercials."
Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business. Send your higher education technology news to her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
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