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ENVIRONMENT
The General Services Administration (GSA) National Capital Region
(NCR) of the Public Buildings Service (PBS) consists of one main office
and 67 field sites. The field sites are distributed throughout the Washington
DC metropolitan area. There are around 1,100 users at the main site and
1,000 users distributed among the field sites. The main site contains over
70 servers operating in a mixed mode environment (Microsoft Windows 2000
and NT 4.0). 27 out of the 67 field sites house servers.
CHALLENGE
In the mid 1990s, GSA began to look for ways to centralize its data operations,
and standardize its IT systems to achieve greater efficiency, improve
its network performance, and provide the scalability needed throughout
its operations. Prior to implementing a NAS/SAN solution, GSA was departmentalized
where each department maintained its own server, backups, and files. In
order to facilitate the administration and sharing of resources, 3H Technology
(3H) recommended a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution.
SOLUTION
In 1998, 3H implemented a Network Attached Storage (NAS) for GSA to provide
centralized data storage consolidation and efficient file access for mission
critical files/applications such as: occupancy agreements, leases, and
CAD drawings. A NAS solution was originally adopted due to the following
reasons:
- Connects directly to the network (application server does not have
to be brought down to add storage) and allows client access to data
without going through an application server.
- Supports file sharing in heterogeneous networks running Windows NT®,
Windows® 95/98/2000 operating systems.
- Uses a dedicated, real-time operating system and file system that
is locally managed by the NAS server.
- Relatively easy to deploy and manage.
In 2000, GSA's data had doubled in size. Adding more NAS devices would adversely
affect the performance of the network and increase the backup window to
unacceptable time. 3H upgraded GSA from a NAS to a Storage Area Network
(SAN) to take advantage of:
- Scalability
- Fault Recovery
- Better Manageability (without bogging down the LAN environment)
With the rapid growth of GSA's data reaching in the terabytes (TB), a SAN
makes it easy to add storage without the necessity of taking down a server.
Since a SAN is a network, it is independent of any single device connected
to it. To add a device, all that's necessary is to give the device a LUN
(logical unit number) and connect it to the SAN.
The SANs solution implemented at GSA allows for the overall storage expansion
and scalability, reliability, data protection, speed, and centralization
of the data growth. The current SANS design at GSA consists of 2 highly
available Windows 2000 Server cluster solutions serving over 1.5 terabytes
(TB) of mission critical data, and being complemented with a state of
the Art ADIC scalar 1000 for backups. This current solution allows for
infinite growth.
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NAS/SAN