 Provided by: NetApp
Application Focus: Storage Industry Focus: Government
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Storage Efficiency at the City of Sioux Falls Leads to Better VMware Data Protection, Hours Saved
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| Sioux Falls has been consistently ranked one of the most tax-friendly U.S. cities to live in and retire to. Forbes Magazine also designated it one of the top cities in which to find a new job. Such accolades have led to major growth in the city’s population, now over 154,000 people, as well as in the city services and infrastructure needed to support them. By default, the City of Sioux Falls Central Services Department—and its 20-person IT staff—was forced to find more budget-conscious, efficient
ways to support the growing data and application needs of the 22 departments and 1,100 city employees now under its care. Applications in a growing standalone VMware® environment were at risk of single-point failure
The solutions was to pair VMware with NetApp for better reliability, faster data protection, and rapid restores.
For help in upgrading the VMware server/storage infrastructure, Watembach and his team turned to John Conlin at Mocha Data, a NetApp partner and provider of IT solutions. Mocha Data outlined a game plan that would help the city achieve two of its main goals: growing its ESX server farm and mirroring the data off site for extra protection. After Watembach and his team evaluated EMC and NetApp, a short demo of NetApp Snapshot™ functionality tipped the scales in NetApp’s favor.
Today, a NetApp FAS3050C uses the iSCSI Protocol to support 30+ VMs installed across three ESX Server nodes. An underlying IBM Blade Server connects the ESX nodes to the NetApp storage. NetApp’s multiprotocol support
has helped with the IVN video system especially, allowing it to simultaneously support
the system’s virtual IVN portal server and virtual SQL Server® database storage (via iSCSI), while also supporting fast video file storage and access (via CIFS). SnapMirror now replicates city data, including about 30GB of daily police video, to a second NetApp FAS3020 system at the fire station.
The city credits use of NetApp technologies like Snapshot, SnapMirror, and FlexVol with significant time and space savings, increases in IT efficiency, performance, and overall system reliability.
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Other Blade server-oriented Case Studies from this company
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| Application Type: Virtualization - Infrastructure
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NetApp Case Study - AISO Virtualization Cuts Energy Use by 70%
Affordable Internet Services Online, Inc. (AISO) was founded as the country's first solar-powered hosting company, running 100% on solar energy. But by 2006, the cooling and energy demands of its growing IT infrastructure was pushing the limits of its existing solar arrays. Its challenge was to meet its Web-hosting requirements, including high performance for responsive services, systems redundancy for maximum uptime, and scalability for continued growth, without fueling a costly upward spiral of energy consumption.
The solution was to implement an energy-efficient business continuance solution with VMware on NetApp.
Collaborating with NetApp and Sirius Computer Solutions, a national IT solution provider, AISO designed an energy-efficient virtualized infrastructure. Built on IBM BladeCenter servers and NetApp storage, the environment based on VMware meets AISO performance, availability, and scalability requirements while enabling a dramatic reduction in data center footprint and energy usage. Consolidation of 120 servers with direct-attached storage resulted in an immediate 60% reduction in power consumption.
Today AISO's environment using VMware on NetApp serves a global community of more than 15,000 clients, including green-movement notables like Discovery Communications and Google (a consortium site). NetApp provides the storage for all of AISO's business, including hosting platforms, Web design, financial systems, and other applications that run in the virtual environment. A NetApp FAS3070 system, configured with active-active controllers for highest availability, provides storage resources to some 400+ virtual desktop systems running on eight physical servers communicating by NFS to the NetApp FAS3070HA system. A NetApp FAS270c system supports test and development activities.
Since fully deploying the virtual infrastructure, AISO has seen a 70% decrease in energy usage.
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| Application Type: Storage
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NetApp Case Study - Activision Storage Modular Storage Environment
As a leading worldwide video game publisher, developer, and distributor, Activision, Inc. needed a modular storage environment to unify corporate departmental access across all company tiers. The infrastructure had to be easily deployed within the company's 12 game development studios and 2 main data centers and provide a unified way of communicating among all locations.
The company also needed a major refresh of its business applications. To do so, it needed to test and develop new corporate wide applications efficiently and to create several copies of production data. It also needed to replace its manual data recovery process to automate, consolidate and increase its disaster recovery capability to comply with its auditing process and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.
Activision turned to NetApp storage solutions to deploy a complete infrastructure to manage corporate-wide data and application assets. It installed a NetApp R200 for backup and recovery at both its corporate office in Santa Monica and at its disaster recovery site in Burbank. To support the growing size of its applications, it upgraded to a FAS6030 to manage backup and recovery in its 12 Burbank studios.
NetApp SnapMirror replicates all Oracle databases, Microsoft® Exchange 2003 mailboxes, and other media-based applications at least once a day to the data recovery site in Burbank. This completely protects Activision's intellectual property, ensuring that even it the company lost use of its system, it wouldn't lose more than one day's worth of work.
Activision deployed a FAS3000 series system in each of its 12 remote locations and utilizes NetApp SnapMirror for disk-to-disk replication to complete its DR architecture.
The Activision NetApp based storage and disaster recovery solution results in a better infrastructure, more streamlined development and more reliable data protection.
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Other Blade server-oriented SOLUTIONS from this company
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| Solution Type: Virtualization - Infrastructure
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Application Virtualization Solutions.
 Server virtualization has emerged as the most dramatic market inflection of the decade and has resulted in millions of dollars in savings. The positive effects on business, technical and operational environments are still emerging yet virtualization has delivered on the promise to reduce power, cooling and space requirements - with savings of 40% or more. These savings have been realized by solving problems caused by inefficiently utilized server resources.
However, this only represents one facet of the capabilities and flexibility that can be achieved through virtualization. Additional operational efficiencies can also be realized by:
- using efficient server architectures like IBM's BladeCenter, a highly integrated system that helps save up front purchase costs and ongoing operational costs
- deploying integrated applications that perform and operate more efficiently like Citrix's XenApp and XenServer platforms for virtualized application delivery
- using integrated data protection mechanisms like those available between Citrix XenServer and NetApp's FAS storage, that provide a cost effective means of protecting your business data, and making the combination of application, virtual machine, server and storage platforms a truly end-to-end and reliable virtualization solution.
- Replacing PCs with energy efficient desktop or mobile thin clients.
This solution describes how these technologies and capabilities were brought together to provide an ideal Citrix XenApp virtualization environment that can help businesses obtain a return on investment that transcends initial savings from basic consolidation.
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