Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : McData (MCDT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gus who wrote (49)	8/29/2000 6:47:07 PM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 234

Server consolidation is a regularly occuring trend in Corporate America. This year, NT server consolidation is expected to be one of the hottest markets in the server business. Judging by the cutting-edge internal switch fabric and external switch fabric designs coming down the pike, it seems that the expectation is that the general increase in network bandwidth will fuel the proliferation of clustered and rack-mounted servers (disk-based and diskless) that will dominate the front-end or the edge of the intelligent storage node architectures (information-centric) now being deployed, relentlessly integrating all the functions being performed by general-purpose servers, network-attached storage servers and different types of early-generation traffic management/load balancing LAN/WAN appliances. The Challenge People's Bank was expanding its data center in Bridgeport, Connecticut by adding servers and storage as the need arose. With 25 NT servers already installed, the data center was running out of physical space. More importantly, the company was running into server administration issues. "We had a lot of small departmental servers and were faced with the challenge of how to grow our storage system," explains Raju Palnitkar, Vice President, Server Systems. "With self-standing carousels, we were literally running out of physical space. We also encountered an increasing number of hardware errors and failures. The self-standing carousels were not transferable between different server platforms." *People's Bank decided to move to a couple of larger servers because they would be more scalable, manageable and cost efficient, according to Palnitkar.* The company wanted to centralize its storage system, and turned to EMC and McDATA for help. The SAN Solution People's Bank previous storage system was decentralized and encountered periodic hardware errors. In addition, each server was only able to hold 10-20 GB of data. The organization ran into limitations in terms of scalability, limited fault tolerance and lagging disk speeds. People's Bank selected EMC and McDATA systems to implement a SAN. As Palnitkar explains, "We chose EMC and McDATA for their reliability and because they provided us with a one-stop shop for all of our disk-related issues." People's BAnk purchased two McDATA ED-5000 Directors, one EMC Symmetrix 3830 and one EMC Symmetrix 3400 storage system. The company's 25 production servers run on NT and UNIX platforms. During implementation, the servers were connected to the McDATA ED-5000 Director. *As a result, People's BAnk was able to reduce the number of servers to four and increase storage capacity to 100 GB per server.* As part of the consolidation, it became apparent that People's BAnk needed highly reliable and fault tolerant connections that required greater system bandwidth. They selected a Fibre Channel backbone due to its increased bandwidth capabilities. "The SAN was the best solution," says Palnitkar. "By installing a SAN, we have the opportunity to easily meet our scalability and availability requirements while reducing our system downtime." Quantifiable Results - Decreased server administrators through elimination of weekend work and overtime - Reduced System Downtime - Provided easier scalability to meet continuously growing data requirements - Increased system reliability and manageability - Consolidated servers from 25 to 4 mcdata.com