Data Guard Systems sees power savings with SAN rollout
May 16, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Moving to a storage-area network (SAN) has saved Data Guard Systems Inc., a provider of a hosted online accounting package for 3,000 independent cell phone stores, enough money to pay for the new storage arrangement within a year.
Data Guard Systems, which president and founder Timothy Maliyil describes as being "like Salesforce.com for a specific niche," had been using 60 servers in a data center, plus another 60 servers for redundancy and backup to prevent any downtime. Those servers required 240 amps of power. And the Cambridge, Mass., company was faced with having to buy another 30 servers -- plus an additional 30 backup servers -- to handle the tripling in business it had experienced the previous year.
Instead, it moved in March to a SAN comprising EMC Clariion CX500 arrays totaling between 6TB and 7TB of storage from Dell and four Dell PowerEdge 6800 servers with dual-core processors.
The Dell servers run VMware to virtualize the company's older servers, and the entire SAN uses just 24 amps of power, Maliyil said -- a tenth of what was needed before. Virtualizing the servers also resulted in much higher utilization.
Because Data Guard was using three data centers -- in Boston, Denver and New York -- Maliyil saved $20,000 a month in data center costs, money that primarily went for electricity. The SAN itself cost $150,000, and the servers and other incidentals another $75,000, for an overall price tag of $225,000.
"It paid for itself in a year," Maliyil said. "I'd rather spend money on hardware than on a data center."
Moreover, adding data center space would likely have meant the expense and effort of setting up hardware in a different part of the building and running fiber between the two operations, Maliyil said.
Data Guard approached several vendors, and "Dell beat out the competition by a significant amount," Maliyil said. His company, which started as a consulting project three years ago, now has 35 employees. Support costs are unavoidable with the servers, but the company can run the SAN with a lean staff, meaning Maliyil didn't need to add more employees when business tripled.
The SAN has also made backups and disaster recovery easier. Previously, the servers at one data center were backed up over a point-to-point connection to another data center, using compression to reduce the amount of data transferred. Now Maliyil can push data from an entire server to another data center using EMC Corp.'s SAN Copy software, he said.
"If we had a physical disaster, we have the data stored remotely," he said, noting that the company doesn't do backups to tape any longer because restoring from a disk is faster -- and his customers demand the speed.
With the new setup, Maliyil said, he is ready for more corporate growth.
"Because we bought this, we have room to grow -- even if we had another explosive year like last year," he said.
