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HP SAN and Nth Generation play leading roles in IT Overhaul at Screen Actors Guild
- Chief Information Officer Nader Karimi
SAG Producers Pension and Health Plans
SAG-PPHP selected HP over EMC, Sun/Hitachi,
and IBM because HP was price competitive, offered superior technology,
and could provide a complete solution to eliminate the danger of finger
pointing between vendors. The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array
5000 systems (EVA5000) enabled SAG-PPHP to consolidate direct-attached
storage onto a single storage-area network (SAN) – reducing
staff workload while dramatically improving storage management, flexibility,
and organizational agility.
The IT upgrade earned glowing reviews, thanks to a predominantly HP
storage and server infrastructure. The EVA5000-based storage architecture
enabled the organization to reduce backup times by up to 50 percent,
improve efficiency through storage consolidation, and reduce total
cost of ownership. HP value-added reseller Nth Generation and HP Services
helped SAG-PPHP design the new infrastructure and coordinate testing
and installation.
Standing in the virtual spotlight
"We looked at SAN solutions from Sun/Hitachi,
EMC, IBM, and HP," explains SAG-PPHP's Executive Vice President
and CIO Nader Karimi. "Only HP offered the total solution we
needed. Since we had already chosen an HP server infrastructure, it
made sense to choose HP for our storage needs too – especially
considering the superiority of the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual
Array 5000 system."
Key applications in the solution include the full Oracle E-Business
Suite and the Java-based development environment from BEA Systems.
These require the high-performance, high-availability server and storage
capabilities delivered by HP rp5405 servers running the HP-UX operating
system, as well as HP ProLiant blade server technology.
The EVA5000 has a starring role in the smooth implementation of these
complex applications. According to Karimi, the EVA5000 was the best-fit,
enterprise-class storage solution, which could also support and integrate
seamlessly the SAG-PPHP heterogeneous IT environment of VMS, UNIX
and the Microsoft Windows NT platforms. The virtually "capacity
free" snapshot capability of the EVA5000 enables the SAG-PPHP
implementation team to run tests on actual production data, which
has helped streamline application implementation. "Instead of
working with test data, we can use a snapshot of actual production
data and get a much more accurate picture of how the application will
perform," Karimi notes.
The combined capabilities of the EVA5000 system's VersaStor-enabled
virtual RAID storage and HP OpenView Storage Area Manager enable Karimi's
team to manage storage resources across the organization remotely
and with less effort. Instead of manually tracking and managing direct-attached
storage on dozens of individual servers, Karimi and his staff are
now able to manage storage resources centrally in the organization's
SAN and elsewhere. HP VersaStor technology provides distributed storage
virtualization in every StorageWorks EVA system, which provides dynamically
allocated virtual storage pools the IT team can change on the fly.
"Using HP StorageWorks solutions makes a dramatic
difference in storage management," Karimi notes. "Managing disk storage is usually a constant struggle. In
many cases, half of your servers are sitting there with too
much disk space and the other half have too little; until
now, there was no way to efficiently balance the load.
With the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array and
HP OpenView software, we have point-and-click control of
all of our storage. We have doubled or tripled our available storage
capacity, yet reduced the management burden on our staff. With solutions
from other vendors, we would have needed one of their technicians
just to make changes in the storage configuration."
- Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services
Kevin Donnellan, SAG-PPHP
SAG-PPHP's Director of Enterprise Infrastructure
Services, Kevin Donnellan, also appreciates the ease of adding SAN
storage. "Other monolithic or mainframe approaches require
large up-front investments, even before a company needs the storage.
With HP, we add storage quickly and as required, allocating those
costs to future projects. That's important because as we are transitioning
to new applications and services, we now have the flexibility to
adapt to any storage need as it arises, and we can do it very quickly."
"The Storage Node Manager within the HP OpenView Storage Area
Manager software suite is a powerful tool that gives us a detailed
view of all our local and SAN network elements – including
capacity, utilization, and disk-drive status," Donnellan continues.
"We are already experiencing improved storage-management efficiency,
and believe this will improve even further as we learn more of the
system's capabilities."
Understudy shines
The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Backup Solution (EBS) combines high-speed
Fibre Channel connections, Veritas Backup Exec software, and HP
StorageWorks SDLT tape libraries for SAN-based tape backups. The
high-capacity StorageWorks libraries come with 320 GB tape drives
and touch-screen GUI control. The EBS backs up the SAN and multiple
servers over fast Fibre Channel switches while offloading traffic
from the corporate network. StorageWorks tape libraries enable storage
consolidation in a single, high-density format. "Thanks to
our new HP StorageWorks tape libraries, we will save thousands in
media expenses and labor we formerly devoted to handling tape drives
and coordinating backups,"
Donnellan notes. "By automating, we simply send finished tapes
to our backup site for safekeeping. It once required a full-time
person there to handle data restoration – now it's almost
a lights-out facility."
The former process also required manual file restoration of tapes
of Oracle data and customer service and claims-processing transactions.
It took up to 18 hours to process more than 60,000 health plan claims
monthly and 1,200 daily customer service calls, generating 100 MB
of changes each day.
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