If you go to Williamsburg, Va. on the right day of the year, it'll
still be 1776. Hundreds of actors, called interpreters, inhabiting
the preserved 18th-century town will be reenacting the day when
news of the Declaration of Independence reached the area. On
another day, the news might be of the Boston Tea Party or of the
battles of Lexington and Concord.
But behind the carefully preserved historical artifacts and
performance is a very modern corporate conglomerate, headed by The
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, a nonprofit that has some 1,400
employees and manages businesses from souvenir catalogs to the five
hotels on the property with more than 1,000 rooms. This foundation
has close to 40 terabytes (TB) of storage, including three 1.2 TB
Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) FAS250 filers and a 32 TB NetApp
R200 nearline box, which are used to store data that spans the
gamut from high-resolution promotional photographs to personal
documents folders.
Last summer, Colonial Williamsburg found it was in danger of
exceeding the capacity of the FAS250s, but an analysis of the data
showed that 90% of it was more than 90 days old and should be on
the R200, which the company uses for secondary storage and
archiving.
"We wanted something that would not mean we had to replace our
entire NetApp environment, but would make migration simpler between
those different filers," said Sean Maisey, manager of IT operations
and engineering for The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. After a
long purchasing process, the foundation decided on, and has begun
to install, Acopia Networks Inc.'s ARX
virtualization switch to address this
problem.
The switch sits in front of the NetApp filers and assumes the
filer alias users already know -- so if a user knows a file is on
NetApp 3, the actual NetApp 3 is renamed, and Acopia assumes the
NetApp 3 name. Thus, the user can continue saving and accessing
files to NetApp 3 without ever knowing that the Acopia system is
actually sending them to the Tier-2 R200 box. Meanwhile, for Maisey
and his staff, the Acopia switch will migrate the data
automatically according to policy. Currently, he said, Colonial
Williamsburg has one of the FAS250s set up behind the Acopia
switches; the system was first installed right before
Christmas.
The switch will also be a help when it comes to maintenance,
Maisey said. "Right now if we need to migrate files or do work on a
box, we have to tell our users their files won't be available
during a certain window, like between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., and then
take them offline," he said. "Once we get the Acopia set up, we'll
just be able to put all the data from a filer onto the R200 and
take it offline for a couple of days if we have to, with the end
users none the wiser."
The foundation considered replacing the NetApp filers with
clustered systems from Isilon Systems Inc., but decided against it
as it would have meant a costly rip and replace of its entire
storage environment.
"The Isilon system, for the amount of storage we need, would
have cost between $300,000 and $400,000," Maisey said, compared
with the dual Acopia switches, which he said cost around $100,000.
"And we would still have needed a way to migrate the data over to
[the Isilon system]."
The selection of Acopia, Maisey said, also allowed him to solve
his space problem on the NetApp filers without totally ruling out
Isilon. "The beauty of the Acopia is that I could still get Isilon
somewhere down the road if we really want it," Maisey said.
The Acopia product promises that open files can be migrated
without users ever knowing the difference, but for now, Maisey said
he prefers to keep it safe by performing migrations during slow
hours, usually between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m.
"They claim that you can migrate any time," he said. "But so far
we've avoided that just for cautionary purposes -- there's a nice
wow factor, but I really don't feel like pulling the switch on,
say, an Easter weekend when our ticket lines are out to the parking
lot."
One hitch with the Acopia is a compatibility problem that has
arisen in places with Apple Macintosh workstations -- the Acopia
system doesn't always recognize the Mac-to-PC file system
conversion software (Thursby Software Systems Inc.'s DAVE product)
Colonial Williamsburg is using, and the DAVE system doesn't always
see the Acopia correctly. "We have less than 25 Macs," Maisey said.
"So it's not a huge problem for us." And, he added, the problem has
been worked around with basic troubleshooting so far.
What about the traditional fear about virtualization -- the fear
of putting all the data eggs in one basket? "The risk of a hardware
switch failure is not too great, since we have them in a dual
high-availability configuration," Maisey said. "The worry would be
about the Acopia database being corrupted or files
misdirected."
But, he said, even in the worst case scenario, the Acopia could
be ripped out of the environment if it totally malfunctions without
any real data loss. "We would have to go back in and reshare files
in the case of total disaster," Maisey said. "But we wouldn't
really lose anything."