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where no san has gone before...From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 6, Issue 8 - October 2006 As one of the world's most famous providers of mission-critical data in the aerospace industry, NASA Langley Research Center (Langley) clearly places a premium on the quality of its storage infrastructure. With a mission to provide clients with fast access to all types of relevant documentation, Langley recently identified a cost-effective way to leverage its existing IP network by creating a fully redundant, iSCSI-based, SAN to meet its ever-increasing storage demands. Prior to migrating to iSCSI architecture, Langley had several document management systems that were used for various programmes and projects. These stored a variety of document types, including presentations, reports, technical data and multimedia files. "We wanted to provide a solution that would easily allow our research and business units to store, search and retrieve their information and use this as the foundation for a larger management initiative," comments Jeff Seaton, chief technical officer, NASA Langley Research Center. "We expect that this new system will provide efficient, centre-wide access to information that previously resided in many different locations, ranging from people's individual hard drives to a variety of project unique document management tools." The challenge for Langley was that its existing systems were based on direct attached storage (DAS). That storage environment worked fine for small projects with a limited number of documents, but the research center needed to build a scalable system that could support any size project. "Our goal was to capture many forms of information over the long term, as part of a knowledge management initiative," says Seaton. "That meant starting with small amounts of data during our pilot testing phase, then rapidly increasing storage capacity to support many new projects and teams as the system went operational and expanded." As there was no way for Langley to anticipate the needs of every potential customer, Seaton considered it essential to move away from DAS and investigate other storage options, such as iSCSI. "Some of our existing direct-attached storage systems weren't using any kind redundancy, so if there was a failure it meant replacing the hardware and restoring data from a backup," Seaton comments. "We were very interested in deploying a storage architecture that would not have a tremendous learning curve. We wanted to get a solid architecture in place that would allow us to begin working with applications that were to be built upon." Seaton deemed the correct path forward for constructing a SAN was to leverage the existing Ethernet technology with which his staff were already familiar. At this stage, Langley turned to the experts at SANZ, a storage and integration-consulting firm focused exclusively on the design, deployment and support of intelligent management, which led to the choice of six QLogic iSCSI HBAs. "We were looking for a storage system that would be more robust and provide
built-in redundancy, including disk drives and power," Seaton observes, adding
that measuring worker productivity to quantify return on investment was also an
important objective. Seaton concludes that the new SAN will facilitate this
goal. Fortunately, QLogic iSCSI HBAs address this issue directly. The QLA4010C features a TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) that accelerates the performance of TCP/IP traffic by shifting the burden of protocol processing from the servers to the HBAs. Also, each QLA4010C HBA handles iSCSI processing as well, which allows it to function as a full offload adapter. This method further frees up valuable CPU cycles by reducing system interrupts and reduces memory bus traffic. That allows Langley's Document Management System application by Xerox to perform at optimum efficiency. Looking to the future, Seaton says Langley will most likely be able to take advantage of another key iSCSI SAN feature, namely the architecture's ability very simply to provide connectivity across large distances to other facilities across the US. "At this point, we're not working with any remote access connectivity, but we are collaborating with two NASA centres on the West Coast," Seaton adds. "So now, with iSCSI, we have a viable option to pursue this opportunity, while keeping our performance edge." Seaton credits the new SAN with Langley's ability to concentrate on paving
the way for a bright aerospace future. "Our iSCSI SAN has made the management of
our storage much easier, given us a clear and relatively inexpensive path to
expand our capacity and provided us with new approaches to data reliability and
backup," he adds. |
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