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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Frasca who wrote (27184)	5/30/2000 8:16:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

InterLan Technologies Inc. provides application hosting and Internet connectivity services to small to mid-size companies. Those companies "recognize that they need a Web presence, but either they aren't technology-savvy or they don't want to deal with investing in a data center and technical staff," explains Mark Nilsson, InterLan's chief technology officer. InterLan provides this capability for them, including data center, servers, storage, backup, technical support, connectivity, and application development. Nilsson says 70% to 80% of InterLan's revenue base is currently customers looking for Web hosting and application management, as opposed to pure connectivity. Starting out in a 500-sq.-ft. facility, InterLan's data center now occupies more than 30,000 square feet. InterLan began operations with Sun StorEdge A1000/D1000 12-disk RAID arrays. However, it quickly became clear that this solution would not be practical for the large amount of database storage they were bringing online. Says Nilsson, "We found a lot of companies were looking for relatively small amounts of RAID storage (100GB or less), and these small arrays took up a lot of shelf space and also used different management systems." Another problem associated with database storage requirements is the distribution and segregation of arrays, with some disks used for caching, some for volumes, some for data. "This really used up a lot of disks quickly, and you could end up using an entire array for a 9GB database," says Terry Rowbotham, InterLan's vice president of engineering. "Then, each time a customer's needs grew, it would be necessary to shut down the system to add capacity." Nilsson says they soon recognized they would need to move to on-demand storage. "We wanted to not only meet our customers' current storage needs, but also provide the capacity to increase their storage on demand without having to bring their pipe down or swap hardware." InterLan's Fibre Channel SAN consists of seven MTI Vivant V20 Fibre Channel storage arrays, servicing both Sun Unix and HP Windows NT servers. Each Vivant V20 array is configured with thirty-six 36GB Seagate Cheetah Fibre Channel drives, for a total of 1.3TB per unit. MTI certifies all of its SAN components, including HBAs. HP HBAs are used in the HP servers, while the Sun servers use Emulex HBAs for PCI connections and JNI HBAs for S-bus connections. Currently, InterLan has both single and dual-hosting capability over a 25-port switched fabric. Rowbotham says they will add more switching capability as capacity requirements increase. MTI ships V20 arrays with 8-port and 16-port Ancor Communications switches, but each of InterLan's V20s currently has two 16-port switches for a total of 196 switched connections. "Hopefully, Fibre Channel will be going to 32-port and 64-port switches in the very near future," says Rowbotham. [Editor's note: Ancor and Inrange Technologies last month began shipping 64-port Fibre Channel switches.] Rowbotham strongly recommends that SAN implementers stay with open-system designs. "There isn't any standard for SANs yet, and until one develops, you need to be confident that your vendors will comply with standards when they do come out, and not lock you into a proprietary environment." Although InterLan hasn't yet benchmarked transfer rates, Rowbotham says they haven't experienced any bottlenecks. "The majority of our customers have large databases that are extremely read/write intensive, and we specifically went with Fibre Channel because of its performance and expandability." Another primary requirement for Inter-Lan's storage solution was to have LUN mapping (or masking) technology within the storage arrays to isolate each customer's assigned storage. MTI's Data Shield volume-mapping firmware provides this capability by mapping the worldwide name of each server's HBA directly to its assigned storage. Data Shield has also helped minimize any problems from multiple operating systems on the same SAN. Says Rowbotham, "NT will try to take as much of the disk space as possible, but by isolating the LUNs we can manage it." More....... is.pennwellnet.com