The best tweaks for greater storage performance

Optimizing storage on multiple fronts

Optimization often takes a combination of technologies. That's the case at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Its IT team, which recently implemented a disk-to-disk backup product from Network Appliance along with HDS storage-virtualization technology, knows something about the role technology can play in making things run better.

Baylor had been relying on tape for weekly backups of roughly 40TB of file data and another 5TB of application data. Those backups had begun to take increasingly longer to finish. "We'd spend countless hours backing up just the [storage] volumes," says Michael Layton, director of enterprise services and information systems at the college.

That was before Layton and Vo Tran, manager of enterprise servers and storage, began using NetApp disk storage systems and SnapVault software to replicate NetApp Snapshot data copies to separate, secondary storage. For primary storage, Baylor uses a NetApp FAS980C (two-node cluster). The secondary SnapVault backup target is a NetApp FAS6070 storage system, Tran says.

In moving from tape to disk via SnapVault, the college has shortened backup and restoration time to one-tenth of what it was before, Layton says. Plus, his team is on track to make it possible for the college's internal users to recover lost files on their own, he says. The self-service recovery server will appear as another "recovery-oriented" file share to users, with a file directory structure similar to that of their primary file share. If they inadvertently delete a file, or if a file becomes corrupted, they will be able to point to the recovery server, where they can locate and copy over the original file easily. That's huge from a self-healing perspective, Layton says.

On another front, given the college's recent acquisition of the HDS TagmaStore USP for storage virtualization, Layton and Tran are looking forward to providing customers storage capacity on demand while reducing to one SAN-management interface, down from eight. More important, Layton expects this move will let his dedicated storage personnel manage twice the amount of storage with no additional head count -- going from what amounts to 90TB of Fibre Channel and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment-based network storage to as much as 170TB of storage over the next few years.

No stranger to virtualization, Layton and Tran also took advantage of the NetApp V-Series V980C virtualization system earlier in its network-attached-storage (NAS) consolidation efforts to help ease the pain of migrating files to the new NetApp-based NAS systems and gateways also backed by HDS SAN storage.

With optimization, storage managers get more done in shorter windows, no longer fret over backups and recoverability, and don't get caught up with "putting out fires," Layton says. "They can actually do something more proactive to manage our storage environment."