Corporate Headquarters
QLogic Corporation 26650 Aliso Viejo Parkway Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 949.389.6000
www.qlogic.com
Europe Headquarters
QLogic (UK) LTD. Surrey Technology Centre 40 Occam Road Guildford Surrey GU2 7YG UK +44 (0)1483 295825
C A S E S T U D Y
According to Ohme, time spent trying to fix these problems in constant firefighting
mode took the IT staff away from activities that could help promote better system
performance. “We do not have any dedicated storage administrators, so when the
McDATA switches lost connections to storage devices holding our data, we had to
drop what we were doing and perform numerous tech support dumps that wasted
hours of downtime.”
There were other issues with the McDATA switches. Ohme says that the McDATA
administrative interface was difficult to use, which took even more time away
from critical IT work. “We had to plod through the process of assigning worldwide
names for every device in the SAN. We had to maintain a spreadsheet to
double-check zoning configurations,” he said. “Even more time was lost when
the administrative software locked us out, forcing us to reset the firmware to
reestablish our passwords. After a few months of these problems compounded by
difficulties getting through to customer service, we decided it was time to pull the
plug and go back to our QLogic roots.”
The SANbox 5602 expands storage capacity with scalable data provisioning
“Of all the vendors I called in my search for a new 4Gbps switch, QLogic was the
most responsive,” Ohme said. “The company quickly offered to send engineers
to our site to help identify our ongoing issues. This was more support then we
received with our first deployment, and the amazing thing was that it was not
even their product.”
With 64 dedicated ports and dual-path connections, these QLogic switches would
provide Ohme with more scalability than the McDATA switches—and allow the
Freeze SAN to grow from 21TB to over 100TB in a few months if needed. “The four
QLogic switches allow us to quadruple the amount of storage,” he said. “And if
we need more ports, we can simply stack additional SANbox switches. Unlike the
McDATA design, the QLogic 10Gbps interswitch links do not use switch ports, so
all ports are available for our use.”
The ability to interconnect other QLogic devices, including the company’s two
2Gbps SANbox 5200 switches, reduces the cost of the new SAN. “We use the
5602 models for direct storage and virtualized storage while our SANbox 5200
switches are redeployable for slower speed devices, such as a tape library and
replicated data held in archival storage—all backup and archiving objectives are
covered,” Ohme said.
Utilizing the full potential of the network
According to Ohme, the QLogic solution has also dramatically reduced
administrative time. “In our environment, we have zero room for error or downtime;
it is critical that we can easily manage every aspect of our SAN,” Ohme said. “With
the management tools, we can name both hardware and virtualized components
as we wish—not only does this make administration faster than using worldwide
naming conventions, it also gives us centralized views of the entire fabric
throughout the BladeCenter management and switching environments without
multiple entry points and cross references,” Ohme said. “Just as importantly,
the QLogic graphical user interface allows us to create zones by simply dragging
and dropping items, which saves us even more time—particularly since we are
utilizing virtualization software for load balancing and failover, which can make
configuration complicated.”
Should an issue arise with managing the SAN, QLogic support can troubleshoot
problems with most hardware components. In addition to understanding switching,
Ohme said that QLogic has a keen understanding of how hardware components
from other vendors work, because many QLogic products are preinstalled in other
devices. “Two of our full BladeCenter chassis rely on a mix of 4Gbps and 2Gbps
QLogic mezzanine host bus adapters (HBAs) as well as dual-core and quad-core
processor servers with QLogic Fibre Channel switches internally in the chassis.
This offers trunked connections for greater speed and availability to upstream
switches,” he said. “With these QLogic components, we have been able to utilize
the full potential of our network— not only for just failover but also for better
performance without the added cost typical in competing products. this was a
huge selling point for us.”
Advertising is one of the fastest-moving industries in the world—and now Freeze
has a SAN to match that pace, satisfying their data needs with better reliability and
performance than ever before. And that’s the payoff Freeze had been searching
for all along.
Freeze.com
QLogic technology makes the SAN complete
As seen in this illustration, Freeze relies on two 4Gbps
QLogic SANbox 5602 switches to connect nine IBM
BladeCenter servers running Microsoft SQL Server™,
Microsoft Exchange, MySQL, and other software to a
4Gbps Sun FlexLine 380 disk array controller and two
FalconStor NSS storage virtualization appliances in
its SAN. All of the IBM servers use QLogic mezzanine
HBAs and switch modules to host online promotions
and capture data representing consumer responses to
these programs.
Two 2Gbps QLogic SANbox 5200 switches provide
access to two-tier networks that include archiving
and backups consisting of Xiotech Magnitude, a Dell
PowerVault tape library, and backup servers.
© 2007 QLogic Corporation. all rights reserved. QLogic, the QLogic Logo, the Powered by QLogic Logo, and saNbox are registered trademarks or trademarks of QLogic Corporation. all other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks
of their respective owners. Information supplied by QLogic is believed to be accurate and reliable. QLogic Corporation assumes no responsibility for any errors in this brochure. QLogic Corporation reserves the right, without notice, to makes changes in product
design or specifications.
SN0130934-00 Rev. A
