1. Consolidating Data Management with Enterprise Storage and Backup Systems Barry Ribbeck – Director, Systems, Architecture & Infrastructure, Rice University Hubert Daugherty – Manager, Digital Media Services, Rice University Susie McClure – Systems Analyst, Rice University

2. Rice University Carnegie R1 Designation Ranked in the top 25 schools in US ~ 5000 Students ~ 1100 Faculty ~ 1500 Staff

3. Enterprise Storage and Backups Enterprise - a distributed resource provided centrally Storage - a place to put your stuff Backup - Describes what you are doing when you are not moving forward. When it works, it can be incorporated into your career progressions plan.

4. A Large New Network Project Provided a funding opportunity Defined storage as part of the critical need Provided the required network infrastructure for enterprise storage (Data can live anywhere) A fresh look at technologies for enterprise storage and backups

5. Data Assessment Findings Many distributed resources managed inconsistently No consistent backup strategy Few economies of scale Data management plan – buy more disks Growth Rate of digital storage needs was increasing No differentiation of data retention or DR requirements Old, outgrown and dying backup hardware

6. The Available Resources Very talented and knowledgeable staff Funding Support from administration Understanding from the campus

7. The Challenges Changing EVERYTHING at once In order to transition, we would have to keep 2 systems operational with the same amount of staff who are already over taxed with all of the other changes New skill sets required to maintain new resources

8. Goals If possible, the changes MUST have a positive visible affect on the customers Storage must be able to scale (1/2 PB in 7 years) with no step function costs. Support for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Must support a Multi-tiered storage model Must be a model capable of integrating multi vendor storage Support costs defined for 5 years Staged backups with only full backups to Tape

9. RFP to Storage Vendors SAN with NAS Gateway design defined Invited 7 vendors to respond to the RFP Very wide dispersion of cost vs benefit Bluearc Titan carried the day with a big iron model and 50 TB of initial storage

10. Defined Storage Usage Email Mailbox storage (NO QUOTAS!) Client Home directories and shares –5000 students, 1000 faculty, 1500 staff, 1000+ guests (with quotas) Database storage – Oracle, MSQL, Postgress (Sakai, Coldfusion,etc..) Video Archives Research Data Scratch space

11. Backups Remember Katrina & Rita? Tape is like Listerine We needed a MAID to clean up our backup processes What about Disruptive Technologies? Hardware choices –Copan Systems & Sun/StorageTek Software choice –Commvault

12. Storage Details San Storage components –Positives Standards Based Multiple vendors enable competition –Negatives Difficult to modify SAN architecture Expensive network components –Nas Gateway Provides storage abstraction and management

13. Systemic Performance Dual Raid SATA Drive SAN Storage Dual Raid FC Drive SAN Storage Dual Raid FC Drive SAN Storage Which System Elements Need Additional Optimization?

14. Systemic Performance Dual Raid SATA Drive SAN Storage Dual Raid FC Drive SAN Storage Dual Raid FC Drive SAN Storage Surprise, it’s the regular stuff!

15. Systemic Performance Dual Raid SATA Drive SAN Storage Dual Raid FC Drive SAN Storage Dual Raid FC Drive SAN Storage Dual 6509 frames with 2 dedicated 10G interlinks. One for layer 2 and one for layer 3.

16. Physical / Logical Architecture

17. What we Learned The integration of a lot of new technology took longer than anticipated even though all of the vendors supported well understood standards like NDMP. Outsourcing the integration would have been a mistake due to the complexity and the need for in house knowledge.

18. Bluearc Lessons and Vendor Report Clients can’t compete Outages MUST be coordinated with everything that uses the system Clustered Titan nodes are a requirement Vendor –Great support – very responsive, good technical people –Work well with other vendors –Problems we have worked through NDMP, Replication, LDAP, still some to things to address, getting them to understand Enterprise in HE

19. Copan Lessons and Vendor Report Good Product very reliable Good support team, works well with other vendors Good hardware, very robust, are meeting their claims. 1 drive and 1 shelf failure in 1 year. Software is solid for what we use it for

20. Sun Lessons and Vendor Report Very good support Very good product. Robot and disk drives failed and were replaced and were quickly replaced under support contract.

21. Commvault Lessons and Vendor report Software difficult to get installed even with their professional services Support is lacking in depth but they are very willing to work with us. Windows backups work very well Support works well with other vendors Integration was very difficult and time consuming Software patches were very frequent and problematic Support tracking system is terrible NDMP support is very challenging When the product works, it works well Documentation was poor

22. Contact Information & References Barry Ribbeck Barry.R.Ribbeck@rice.eduBarry.R.Ribbeck@rice.edu Hubert Daugherty hd@rice.eduhd@rice.edu Susie McClure smcclure@rice.edusmcclure@rice.edu www.bluearc.com www.copansystems.com www.sun.com (Storagetek)www.sun.com www.commvault.com www.inphase-technologies.com