Feature

A dynamic four-tier storage design

Project requirements

In setting the requirements of the new storage system, InfoPro determined that the agency would need at least 110 TB initially, as well as the ability to expand beyond 1 PB to handle future needs. The 110 TB would consist of 10 TB of high-speed storage primarily for the database and 100 TB of medium-speed storage for other functions. In addition to the basic sizing requirements, there was a long list of other "wants":

  • Server/storage certification paths (hardware/software wherever available)
  • The ability to support immediate storage needs and to expand beyond 1 PB for future project growth
  • A flexible and manageable base building block for internal and external storage multitiering
  • Three-year, 24/7, on-site training, licensing, installation, maintenance and transitioning support for personnel/software/hardware with a four-hour response
  • Hot site, geographic disaster recovery (DR) through replication and failover capabilities
  • Increased throughput to 4 Gbps while sustaining existing 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps FC host bus adapters (HBAs)
  • Increased storage stability and reliability with virtualization, imaging and snapshot technologies
  • Migration/transition/reconfiguration of existing workgroup storage data, including database clusters
  • Non-impacting application and database backups
  • A 99.9%

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  • vendor guarantee of no data loss
  • Storage accessible by all project resources
  • 10 TB usable initial high-speed tier 1 internal storage expandable to 100 TB
  • 100 TB usable tier 2 medium-speed external storage expandable to beyond 1 PB
  • 48x 1 Gbps, 2 Gbps and 4 Gbps FC storage-area network (SAN) connections expandable to 180 connections
  • Network-attached storage (NAS) cluster failover capability support for NFS, CIFS and iSCSI protocols
  • Backup tape library with minimum 4x LTO-3 drives and 100 tapes, expandable to 16 LTO-4 drives and 500 tapes
  • Non-disruptive hardware/firmware/software upgrades
  • Non-disruptive RAID/logical unit number (LUN) initialization and management (Web based)
  • Symantec Corp. Veritas backup/restore software and licenses (library management)
  • Hot database backups and restores

This was first published in May 2009

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