The Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise found the solution it required for updating their IT infrastructure in a Sun Open Storage solution built on the OpenSolaris and two Sun Fire X4500 servers that provided a virtual storage pool of 12 terabyte for applications running on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. In addition, a cluster of four Sun Fire X4150 servers supported 28 virtual servers running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Server.

This particular implementation created a virtual storage solution that can scale to meet new demands; reduced 28 physical servers to six; reduced server support costs by 70%; cut power costs and increased performance per watt; and resulted in 95% system availability.

The legacy architecture at the diocese included 35 servers running Windows Server 2003. Approximately 1.5 TB of data was hosted on disk and one Dell storage array. The diocese wanted additional capacity so that it could support new projects — such as digitally archiving more than 100 years of paper-based records. The organization also wanted to minimize costs by simplifying administration and increasing server utilization.

After ruling out several competing candidate solutions, the diocese IT staff, followed the recommendation of DigiTar to try an iSCSI SAN built on the OpenSolaris. “I thought it was a crazy idea, but we loaded OpenSolaris on some hardware we had from Dell and ran the performance metrics,” explains Luke Stackle, director of information technology at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boise, Idaho. “The results were impressive.”

According to Stackle, “The amount of storage and performance we could get with the Sun Fire X4500 server running OpenSolaris exceeded the other solutions we looked at, and the Sun solution would be very cost-competitive. Instead of putting all of the money into software, we'd be putting money into the hardware so we'd end up with more drives, more storage, and greater overall performance.” The diocese also decided to replace 10 servers that were up for replacement with four Sun Fire X4150 servers that would run a virtual environment on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

The diocese IT group installed one Sun Fire X4500 server and used Solaris ZFS in OpenSolaris to configure each drive as an iSCSI target in a virtual storage pool. “The whole process didn’t take more than 15 to 20 minutes,” notes Stackle. The diocese then deployed another Sun Fire X4500 server as a backup storage server. In addition, engineers built a virtual server cluster on the four Sun Fire X4150 servers. After discovering each Sun server could support seven virtual servers, engineers migrated 28 physical servers on to the four Sun Fire X4150 servers.

With this implementation in place, the diocese now has not only the power and 24 terabyte of storage to enable new projects, but it is also saving money. “Our new architecture reduces our total cost of ownership,” says Stackle. “We also expect to see at least a 70 percent reduction in our server support costs. Performance per watt will also go up significantly, and our overall power consumption will go down because we are not running as many servers. And because of virtualization, our cost to add another server has essentially gone from several thousand to several hundred dollars.”

System availability, which used to be at 90 percent, has also increased. “We've only been in production for a few weeks and we're beyond 95 percent,” Stackle explains. “We expect that number to go up. Our system's overall responsiveness and reliability will also go up significantly because we have a highly available configuration.

“We're definitely impressed with Sun systems and will look to Sun as we expand in the future,” concludes Stackle. “Sun has provided us with the tools and technologies to do a lot more with a lot less.”

More Information

Sun Fire X4150 Server

Sun Fire X4500 Server

OpenSolaris [...read more...]

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