Background
The City of Greer is home to about 20,000 people and is currently one of the
fastest growing cities in the state.
Over the past few years, the City of Greer has made a significant investment in its
technology and infrastructure. “Our city understands that for us to be successful,
prosperous, and efficient, we need to have a strong backbone supporting the
network,” said David Seifert, Director of Finance and Information Technology. |
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Problem
The City of Greer had a resident system storage structure that consisted solely of
internal storage devices. They found this infrastructure to be inflexible, expensive,
and difficult to scale to its ever increasing storage needs. The urgency for additional
storage was brought on by the need for extended storage for their large mail server
database and their virtualization server which were both running out of internal
storage. |
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Solution
The City of Greer chose CreekPointe to provide them with an HP/LeftHand
IP-based storage solution. Based on a discovery/planning session with IT
Manager, Jim Ridgill, CreekPointe recommended two HP/LeftHand P4300
storage nodes. The two nodes provided a total, raw storage size of 12TB and
all of the features exclusive to HP/LeftHand products. The features included
Network RAID synchronous replication, snapshotting, multi-site disaster
recovery solution pack, online volume migration, self-healing storage, and
much more.
The end result was a storage solution that provided the following benefits:
- Significantly reduce storage costs
- Failover paths for data protection in event of failure
- Centralized storage management & virtualization
- Compatibility with wide range of storage arrays and server
operating systems
- No SCSI or Fiber Channel equipment required
- All mission critical components in RAID array are hot-swappable and
completely redundant
- Solution is fully scalable and will accommodate future storage needs
- Foundation for completely virtualizing their environment
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Objective
To provide increased storage capacity,
high availability and redundancy, and
efficient disaster recovery. |
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Issues
- Needed closer point-in-time
backups of usiness critical
servers.
- Current decentralized storage
solutions are using internal
storage and are running low on
space.
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Benefit
- Storing the databases on the SAN
allows for regularly scheduled
snapshots.
- Migrating the servers to the SAN
allows for centralization and the
ability to expand the virtual disks
on-the-fly without any downtime.
- The SAN features a multi-site
clustering solution supporting
off-site replication enabling
disaster recovery.
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“We've investigated some other
solutions before seeing the
demonstration of the HP/LeftHand proposal by CreekPointe. For
our budget and price-point, there
was no question in our minds which
was the best solution for us…that
was CreekPointe and HP/LeftHand Networks.”
-David Seifert
Director of Finance and Information Technology |
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City of Greer SC