E-marketing firm deploys multifaceted grid storage system

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January 31, 2005 (Storage Networking World) -- Robert Reeder knows what failure is. Earlier this year, a drive on the company's EMC Clariion RAID 5-based system failed, corrupting all its data. When the IT staff turned to its tape backup system to restore the data, that procedure failed as well, resulting in a week's worth of lost data.
This is not an experience that Reeder, CIO at W.A. Wilde, an e-marketing firm in Holliston, Mass., can afford to repeat. The company puts 500 million pieces of direct mail into the postal system each year. "We're all about data now -- it's what drives the documents and what you do with them," Reeder says.

Disaster lurks
That's why, when W.A. Wilde began beta-testing a storage system whose design philosophy seemed to assume that yes, hardware fails, and yes, you have to plan for it, Reeder took an immediate liking to the system. "With RAID 5, the system is called 'fault tolerant,' but it's not," he says. "If one bit is out of place, there's the potential for not being able to restore your data."
The system that Reeder has been testing is Advanstor from ExaGrid Systems in Westborough, Mass. Advanstor is a "self-protecting" NAS system that offers several levels of data protection in one integrated system, including primary RAID 5-based storage, local and remote disk-based backup, off-site disaster recovery, data archiving, data restore and automatic migration across two-tiered storage.
As Reeder sees it, ExaGrid's philosophy seems to be, "Let's build a strategy where we always have a copy of data, no matter what fails." And because the copies are saved on cheap disk, "you don't have to count on sophisticated technology never failing," he says.

NAS and beyond
W.A. Wilde didn't start out with the notion of acquiring such a multifaceted system. Over the past decade, it stored data in many different servers throughout the company, including two in Holliston, and one in Brockton, Mass. The company used EMC Clariion servers for its databases and e-mail, and a variety of other storage servers for individual customer projects.
However, as prices declined on NAS-based systems, the company began looking into consolidating its storage to better control its capacity and storage utilization. "When we had growth areas of the business, we were sometimes using storage that wasn't meant for that purpose, but it's where we had room," Reeder says. "We wanted to do NAS so that everything was housed in one or two locations."
Reeder considered a NAS system from Dell, but that opened up another can of worms, he says. "It only solved the NAS part.

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