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This Best Practices is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

Company:

Mesirow Financial

One of the largest diversified financial services firms in Chicago. Mesirow reported fiscal 2003 revenues of more than $209 million. It manages more than $5 billion in financial assets for its clients, and employs more than 800 people in 11 offices nationwide.

Challenge:

Mesirow Financial outgrew its data storage environment after a period of rapid growth and the acquisition of another company. The company needed to move to a more efficient storage architecture that would scale in storage capacity and performance, and reduce IT processes on storage provisioning and management.

Solution:

Mesirow opted to consolidate all of its direct attached storage (DAS) and network attached storage (NAS) into a storage area network (SAN) that could be managed and protected as a single pool of storage. The SAN had to be capable of supporting an IT infrastructure featuring more than 100 Compaq, Sun, and Novell servers distributed across the company's 11 nationwide offices. Some of the key applications included Sybase relational databases, file servers and e-mail utilizing Microsoft's Exchange technology.

Mesirow chose an EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI-based SAN solution that offers fully redundant and hot-swappable components, and management features that included storage virtualization, snapshots and remote replication. Mesirow first consolidated all of its direct attached storage on two EqualLogic PS100E arrays at its headquarters in downtown Chicago. Afterwards, it installed additional arrays at two of its suburban offices for local storage and remote data replication from headquarters.

The significant challenge was the high price to move to, operate, and upgrade existing SAN technologies. Mesirow determined that EqualLogic's array, virtualization, snapshot, and replication capabilities met its long-term storage needs. The PS array's virtualization capability allows multiple arrays to act as one single pool of storage that can be centrally managed, dynamically allocated, and efficiently backed up to disk and to tape. In addition, when new arrays are added, the PS array's load-balancing technology automatically redistributes data across arrays to achieve maximum performance and efficiency.

Mesirow is addressing its backup and recovery issues with the PS array's Auto-Replication feature and Auto-Snapshot Manager for Windows feature (which works with Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003 Volume Shadow Copy Service) to automate the many tedious tasks required to set up and maintain a regular backup process and help recover failed data instantly. PS arrays at headquarters copy data to the arrays installed at remote locations over standard Ethernet connections provided by its telecommunications provider. And since all PS arrays work together as peers, the arrays in the suburban offices can backup data for headquarters while the main office arrays back up data for the remote offices.

Rules for success:

• Deploy a SAN with complete storage management features: storage

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