Qlogic SANbox 5602 Supplementary Manual

Brand: Qlogic

Model: SANbox 5602

Type: Supplementary Manual

This manual is also suitable for

SANbox 5200 Series

C A S E S T U D Y

As the old saying goes, it pays to advertise—if you can reach the right people. At Freeze

LLC, a Minnesota-based online marketing agency, advertising pays because the agency can

target ads to more than 90 million of the right people. Thanks to information found in creative

advertising developed through offers of free computer wallpaper, cell phone ring tones, clip

art samples, and screensavers, the agency has a database of consumers that is tapped by

clients such as Columbia House, Discover Card, and Sears.

“Our livelihood is based on how well we interact with our end-users and our partners, which

requires us to track millions of consumer interactions a day,” said Kyle Ohme, director of

information and technology at Freeze. “Continual database access is essential, as well as

gauging the effectiveness of our services.”

Storage virtualization can be a real advantage for operations

Until recently, Freeze had relied on a 3TB SAN to safeguard information critical to company

operations. But when the number of consumer interactions surpassed 15 million per day,

Ohme realized that he needed to not only increase storage capacity, but also improve

resiliency against the loss of any of that data. “After researching alternatives, we decided

to adopt a virtualized storage system that would take snapshots of important data withou

impacting performance,” Ohme said. “We also decided to add mirroring, which provides

complete redundancy so nothing can interrupt our ability to track consumer interactions

around the clock.”

To accomplish his two objectives, Ohme supplemented the new SAN with two FalconStor

NSS storage virtualization appliances in a redundant conﬁguration.

Consumer data is sent from IBM

blade servers through switches to a Sun StorageTek 380

device where it is stored. Data snapshots are stored within the same device, which can

then be reattached to another server to replicate large amounts of this information. Two-tier

backup is provided by a Dell PowerVault tape library and offsite storage via a wide area

network (WAN) link to a Xiotech Magnitude 3D 3000 storage device.

Taking the wrong switching path results in company-wide downtime

“In the long term, given our projections for storage growth, we need a powerful SAN switch

that can scale to support over 100TB of data,” Ohme said. “But in the short term, we needed to

expand our storage from our current SAN to our now 18TB FlexLine 380 disk array controller.

McDATA

switches came highly recommended by some of our contacts familiar with storage

virtualization, so we installed two 32-port 4Gbps McDATA Sphereon

™

switches,” he said.

These switches, along with IBM Fibre Channel Switch Modules in the IBM BladeCenter

chassis, provide SAN and network-attached storage (NAS) access for eight fully populated

IBM BladeCenter chassis running a mix of Microsoft

Windows

and Linux

operating

systems. But soon after the McDATA switches were installed, the SAN became unreliable.

“The McDATA switches dropped storage randomly, which caused large amounts of lost staff

time and countless hours of after-hours support,” Ohme said. “No matter what we tried, we

could not keep the switches from failing.”

Freeze.com

QLogic SAN Solution Makes

Continuous Data Access Pay Off

Challenge

Ensure data is continuously available for snapshots of consumer

interactions in an 89TB SAN consisting of storage devices,

storage virtualization, and backup systems

Solution

QLogic provided a complete solution for managing information,

including two QLogic

4Gbps SANbox

5602 and two QLogic

5200 switches that manage a 39TB storage area network (SAN)

composed of one 4Gbps Sun

StorageTek

FlexLine

™

380 disk

array controller, one Xiotech

Magnitude

™

storage device, a

BlueArc Titan storage array, a Dell

™

PowerVault

™

tape library,

and two FalconStor

network storage system (NSS) virtualization

appliances; the QLogic graphical user interface (GUI) management

application is used for rapid and intuitive SAN management;

QLogic mezzanine host bus adapters and QLogic Fibre Channel

switch modules also are used throughout the SAN

Result

The two SANbox 5602 switches and other QLogic SAN technology

provide this online marketing agency with uninterrupted access

to information critical to billing and managing online consumer

promotions

“Along with a host of QLogic SAN components, our SANbox 5602 switches are

critical to protecting data that reaches millions of consumers while making stor-

age virtualization for analytics cost-effective and hassle-free.”

– Kyle Ohme, Director of Information and Technology, Freeze LLC

Corporate Headquarters QLogic Corporation 26650 Aliso Viejo Parkway Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 949.389.6000 www.qlogic.com

Europe Headquarters QLogic (UK) LTD. Surrey Technology Centre 40 Occam Road Guildford Surrey GU2 7YG UK +44 (0)1483 295825

C A S E S T U D Y

According to Ohme, time spent trying to ﬁx these problems in constant ﬁreﬁghting

mode took the IT staff away from activities that could help promote better system

performance. “We do not have any dedicated storage administrators, so when the

McDATA switches lost connections to storage devices holding our data, we had to

drop what we were doing and perform numerous tech support dumps that wasted

hours of downtime.”

There were other issues with the McDATA switches. Ohme says that the McDATA

administrative interface was difﬁcult to use, which took even more time away

from critical IT work. “We had to plod through the process of assigning worldwide

names for every device in the SAN. We had to maintain a spreadsheet to

double-check zoning conﬁgurations,” he said. “Even more time was lost when

the administrative software locked us out, forcing us to reset the ﬁrmware to

reestablish our passwords. After a few months of these problems compounded by

difﬁculties getting through to customer service, we decided it was time to pull the

plug and go back to our QLogic roots.”

The SANbox 5602 expands storage capacity with scalable data provisioning

“Of all the vendors I called in my search for a new 4Gbps switch, QLogic was the

most responsive,” Ohme said. “The company quickly offered to send engineers

to our site to help identify our ongoing issues. This was more support then we

received with our ﬁrst deployment, and the amazing thing was that it was not

even their product.”

With 64 dedicated ports and dual-path connections, these QLogic switches would

provide Ohme with more scalability than the McDATA switches—and allow the

Freeze SAN to grow from 21TB to over 100TB in a few months if needed. “The four

QLogic switches allow us to quadruple the amount of storage,” he said. “And if

we need more ports, we can simply stack additional SANbox switches. Unlike the

McDATA design, the QLogic 10Gbps interswitch links do not use switch ports, so

all ports are available for our use.”

The ability to interconnect other QLogic devices, including the company’s two

2Gbps SANbox 5200 switches, reduces the cost of the new SAN. “We use the

5602 models for direct storage and virtualized storage while our SANbox 5200

switches are redeployable for slower speed devices, such as a tape library and

replicated data held in archival storage—all backup and archiving objectives are

covered,” Ohme said.

Utilizing the full potential of the network

According to Ohme, the QLogic solution has also dramatically reduced

administrative time. “In our environment, we have zero room for error or downtime;

it is critical that we can easily manage every aspect of our SAN,” Ohme said. “With

the management tools, we can name both hardware and virtualized components

as we wish—not only does this make administration faster than using worldwide

naming conventions, it also gives us centralized views of the entire fabric

throughout the BladeCenter management and switching environments without

multiple entry points and cross references,” Ohme said. “Just as importantly,

the QLogic graphical user interface allows us to create zones by simply dragging

and dropping items, which saves us even more time—particularly since we are

utilizing virtualization software for load balancing and failover, which can make

conﬁguration complicated.”

Should an issue arise with managing the SAN, QLogic support can troubleshoot

problems with most hardware components. In addition to understanding switching,

Ohme said that QLogic has a keen understanding of how hardware components

from other vendors work, because many QLogic products are preinstalled in other

devices. “Two of our full BladeCenter chassis rely on a mix of 4Gbps and 2Gbps

QLogic mezzanine host bus adapters (HBAs) as well as dual-core and quad-core

processor servers with QLogic Fibre Channel switches internally in the chassis.

This offers trunked connections for greater speed and availability to upstream

switches,” he said. “With these QLogic components, we have been able to utilize

the full potential of our network— not only for just failover but also for better

performance without the added cost typical in competing products. this was a

huge selling point for us.”

Advertising is one of the fastest-moving industries in the world—and now Freeze

has a SAN to match that pace, satisfying their data needs with better reliability and

performance than ever before. And that’s the payoff Freeze had been searching

for all along.

Freeze.com

QLogic technology makes the SAN complete

As seen in this illustration, Freeze relies on two 4Gbps

QLogic SANbox 5602 switches to connect nine IBM

BladeCenter servers running Microsoft SQL Server™,

Microsoft Exchange, MySQL, and other software to a

4Gbps Sun FlexLine 380 disk array controller and two

FalconStor NSS storage virtualization appliances in

its SAN. All of the IBM servers use QLogic mezzanine

HBAs and switch modules to host online promotions

and capture data representing consumer responses to

these programs.

Two 2Gbps QLogic SANbox 5200 switches provide

access to two-tier networks that include archiving

and backups consisting of Xiotech Magnitude, a Dell

PowerVault tape library, and backup servers.

© 2007 QLogic Corporation. all rights reserved. QLogic, the QLogic Logo, the Powered by QLogic Logo, and saNbox are registered trademarks or trademarks of QLogic Corporation. all other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks

of their respective owners. Information supplied by QLogic is believed to be accurate and reliable. QLogic Corporation assumes no responsibility for any errors in this brochure. QLogic Corporation reserves the right, without notice, to makes changes in product

design or speciﬁcations.

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