February 12, 2001, 11:58 AM — COMPLEX STORAGE networks comprised of multivendor technologies are commonplace in today's IT landscape, but adding storage onto a mixed network can often wind up straining a company's bottom line.
Ken Devine, CTO of WNET Channel 13 in New York, was all too familiar with this scenario. The nonprofit station, which produces such PBS shows as Nature and Great Performances, operates three separate storage domains that support three different operating systems running on two networks. The station's Unix-based fund-raising system and Windows NT-based office-and-accounting system each back up to their own storage domains using the same network; WNET's video production arm, which uses a blend of NT and Macintosh technology, has its own dedicated network and storage domain.
"The demands and issues in video [storage] are separate from the office [storage] demands. The physical storage [requirements] of video are so high, and the demands are so great, that it never occurred to me to combine the networks," Devine explains. "We have 25 edit rooms and someone is working on a project in each one with a baseline of 100GB per room, so you begin to see the scale of [our storage needs]. And that's just the editing," Devine says.
When given a heads up that the TV station would be adding a digital video channel to stream five multicast video signals to WNET's audience in addition to the current broadcast lineup, Devine knew how much added storage capacity would be needed to make all this work. The project had the potential to send his budget skyrocketing.
Devine looked at a variety of hardware-based SAN (storage area network) solutions without finding one that met his needs.
"We've been working in the SAN space for five years with a variety of different vendors, and none of [the solutions] worked ... for a variety of reasons. There was really no standard development. There were a variety of vendors, but no one had everything under one hood," Devine says.
As it turns out, the solution for WNET lay not in any particular vendor's storage box, but in a storage virtualization software solution from DataCore Software, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Simply put, storage virtualization is the ability to arrange multiple physical storage devices, such as disk or tape arrays, into a single "virtual" entity that appears as one disk to the network operator. This virtual storage disk is easier to manage and allows for rapid storage growth and reconfiguration.
The benefits of managing an open-storage platform were driving factors in Devine's decision to go with the DataCore software.
"The thing that got me was it was the only solution I found that virtualized open systems," Devine explains. "Now I can separate the storage from my servers and I can have a great big Pentium-class system doing the storage [serving] without having to use a $100,000 proprietary box -- just a standard system."
Using DataCore's SANsymphony software and its multivendor-friendly approach to pooling storage assets, Devine could move forward with scaling out WNET's storage network using less expensive, generic disk drives while protecting the investment the station had in its existing name-brand storage equiipment.
"SANsymphony allows us to scale out using commodity disks," Devine says. "There are certain companies that insist on making their storage proprietary. I want it to run on an open platform."
With SANsymphony virtualizing WNET's storage, Devine says he can take a storage disk enclosure with eight 9GB drives that cost the station about $12,000 a year ago, and replace them with eight 72GB commodity disk drives for about $8,800.
"Our vendors like to hold on to storage sales as part of their server sales. [But] my mantra is that disk storage is going to be an abundant commodity. So the concept of keeping [the price of] a disk-based storage product artificially high when you need as much as I do doesn't work," Devine says.
Devine first virtualized WNET's fund-raising and office network because of its relative simplicity compared to the storage-heavy video production network, which still uses tape as its storage format.
The virtualization of WNET's video network is now proceeding without a hitch, and Devine is already adding commodity disk storage to the video network in preparation for the digital video channel, which will go live later this year.
