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“ITCom
has a state of the art iSCSI deployment for mission critical
applications,” states Zophar Sante’, VP of Market
Development for SANRAD. “It’s multiple applications being
enabled by a single storage solution. This shows the power of
iSCSI and virtualization when put into the hands of IT
experts.”
“Virtualization
was a critical feature for our SSP model,” commented Pradip
Patel, Manager of Transmission Systems Engineering for ITCom /
ITCS. “We are a Telco and an SSP wrapped into one. As an SSP,
we provide customized storage volumes with different capacity,
performance, and redundancy properties. Every account and
application is different and virtualization provided a key to
giving our hosted applications exactly the type of storage
they needed for each application. With iSCSI we can deliver
storage services and data access to any department or person
on the network.” The network architecture allowed ITCom to
become an efficient and reliable SSP.
“The
new messaging service was another application that benefited
from iSCSI and virtualization,” comments Mr. Patel. “The
new messaging system utilizes three Window 2000 dual-node
clusters connected using iSCSI to a failover pair of
fault-tolerance iSCSI V Switches. Close to a TeraByte of
multi-pathed and mirrored FibreChannel disk provides voice
mail storage space for the campus. The voice mail system is
considered mission critical by the University. The
configuration must be available 24x7 and comply with Telco
specifications of less than 10 minutes of downtime per year or
99.999% availability. The combination of windows-clustered
servers, redundant active/active V Switches with multiple
connections to the servers, and multi-path connections between
the V Switches and the mirrored FC disk systems provide a
highly available architecture. In-band volume virtualization
provided clustered members with a shared volume and enabled
simple volume configuration, storage allocation and the
addition of more disk drives without having to interrupt
critical applications.”
In
addition to storage servers and a new messaging system, the
ITCom, video network engineering was investigating expansion
of the network infrastructure to another remote university. “Telephone,
video and data networks are the doorway to accessing
information crucial to participating in the educational
community,” states Dan Hague, Senior Video Engineer for
ITCom. “We needed to find a way to expand our data and video
network to encompass another university 600 km away. We
installed iSCSI drivers on the remote servers and gave that
university access, over an Internet 2 connection, to an iSCSI
V Switch located in the ITCom labs. This in turn was connected
to the physical Fibre Channel storage systems that housed the
video files that we wanted to share with the other school. We
tested our video streaming application between ITCom and the
other university. We experienced performance of over 7000
packets per second. The performance met our requirement for
speed; it was faster than our direct attached SCSI drives,”
continues Mr. Hague. “Another key to this solution for ITCom
was that we wanted to avoid custom host agents at all costs.
Imagine the challenge and cost of maintaining host agents
within a network this size and among thousands of systems.”
iSCSI is a standard IETF protocol, V Switches perform in-band
volume management and storage virtualization, so no host
agents were needed. Everything is controlled from a single,
network centric platform independent of the host systems.
Several
high-end iSCSI V Switches from SANRAD are in operation at
University of Michigan ITCom. More systems are planned as
ITCom and YaGUSA continue to develop different applications
and services using iSCSI and in-band storage virtualization.
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