ChallengeWith ever-increasing demands

to support new applications and

services, the City of Thousand Oaks,

California, needed to move away

from direct-attached storage and

implement a centralized storage area

network (SAN).

Solution

The city centralized storage on a Dell™

Compellent™ Storage Center SAN, part

of the Dell Fluid Data™ architecture,

improving performance and

service availability while simplifying

storage management.

Benefits• Zero downtime for Dell Compellent

SAN since deployment

• Eightfold faster data recovery

• 86% less storage management time

required (30 minutes/week vs.

3.5 hours/week)

• Up to $5,000 annual savings

on high performance disk with

automated tiered storage

• 30% improvement in storage

utilization with thin provisioning

Application areas• Storage Solutions

• Virtualization

Customer profile

Company City of Thousand Oaks

Industry Government

Country United States

Employees 550

Web site toaks.org

“We can add disk space and just keep going. The users will never know. We have plenty of room to grow with our Dell Compellent SAN.” Dustin R. Hurshman, IT Analyst III, City of Thousand Oaks

City of Thousand Oaks eliminates downtime related to storage

2

The City of Thousand Oaks, California, a planned community created in the mid-1950s, has followed this advice with excellent results. Residents enjoy the benefits of good planning every day, which include less traffic congestion and air pollution than other cities of similar size.

Sometimes, however, plans must change and evolve. The developers that built the community left no recommendations for storing the six terabytes of data the city now depends on to operate. As IT systems proliferated and data volumes grew, scaling services such as email using direct-attached storage was no longer efficient. The city recognized it was time for a new storage solution as part of the natural evolution of city planning.

“I had to replace our mail server twice because we ran out of storage space,” says Dustin R. Hurshman, IT analyst III, City of Thousand Oaks. “That involved a weekend migration and 30 hours of downtime for users. We also had servers with direct-attached storage that was significantly underutilized, so we weren’t making the most cost-effective use of our storage.”

The city also wanted to virtualize many of its servers to reduce costs and enhance disaster recovery capabilities. “We knew that centralized storage would be a prerequisite for doing server virtualization right, so we put out a request for proposal for a storage area network (SAN),” says Hurshman.

Saving up to $5,000 per year with automated tiered storageThe city evaluated various options, including a Hitachi Data Systems solution, but ultimately decided on a Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN. “When we looked at the different products and compared them side by

Technology at work

Services

Dell™ Support Services – Dell Compellent™ Copilot Support

Hardware

Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN

Software

Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay

Dell Compellent Data Progression

Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity

Dell Compellent Enterprise Manager

Novell® GroupWise 8

Novell NetWare

SUSE Linux® Enterprise

VMware® vSphere™

Windows Server® 2008 R2, 2003

“Plans are nothing, but planning is everything,” Dwight D.

Eisenhower once said.

“ The majority of our data has moved down to Tier 3 storage, and at the same time we’ve seen performance improvements for email and databases.” Dustin R. Hurshman, IT Analyst III, City of Thousand Oaks

3

side, the reliability of Dell Compellent just overwhelmed everything else,” says Hurshman.

The Dell Fluid Data architecture provides a flexible storage foundation that dynamically adapts directly in line with customers’ business needs. “I really like the fact that Compellent doesn’t force you into carving out specific disks for a certain RAID group,” says Hurshman. “The Hitachi SAN we looked at would dedicate individual disks to be part of a RAID group, so it wasn’t dynamic.”

Dell Compellent Data Progression writes active blocks of data to Tier 1 storage with performance-optimized RAID levels such as RAID 10, and automatically migrates inactive blocks of data to lower-tier storage with higher-overhead, high-protection RAID 5 or 6. The most active blocks of the city’s data reside on high-performance 15,000 RPM SAS drives, while less frequently accessed data migrates to lower-cost, high-capacity drives.

“The majority of our data has moved down to Tier 3 storage, and at the same time we’ve seen performance improvements for email and databases,” says Hurshman. “We’re using less than one terabyte of our high-performance, Tier 1 disk, which means we won’t have to buy more of it any time soon. We’re saving between $3,000 and $5,000 a year with automated tiered storage.”

With Dell Compellent, the city has the flexibility to use Fibre Channel or iSCSI network connections, depending on workload requirements. “Not only can I mix and match disk types within the same Compellent enclosure, but we also have the freedom to use iSCSI for certain workloads to reduce costs,” says Hurshman. “Most of our connections are

Fibre Channel, but there are situations where we just don’t need the speed. It’s nice to be able to use both, and most of the other SAN solutions we looked at did not allow that flexibility.”

Improving storage utilization by 30%To make sure the city gets the most value out of every disk, Dell Compellent Dynamic Capacity eliminates the problem of pre-allocated but unused capacity that is inherent to direct-attached storage environments. The thin provisioning software completely separates allocation from utilization, enabling users to provision any size volume upfront, yet only consume disk space when data is written. Thin Write technology assesses the incoming payload and designates capacity for each write on demand, leaving unused disk space in the storage pool for other servers and applications.

“We don’t have to worry about allocating storage the way we did when it was all direct attached,” says Hurshman. “Even if I carve out a 100 terabyte volume on the Dell Compellent SAN, it’s only utilizing what it needs, so I can overprovision it if I need to. We no longer need to worry about running out of space on one server while having disk that’s not being utilized on another. We’ve seen a 30 percent improvement in storage utilization with thin provisioning. We are more efficient now.”

When the city does need to add storage capacity to the Dell Compellent SAN, Hurshman can do so on the fly, with no downtime. “We can add disk space and just keep going,” he says. “The users will never know. We have plenty of room to grow with our Dell Compellent SAN, and when we do get to the point where we need to expand, I’ll get notifications.”

“ We haven’t had any issues. The data is always there, no matter what. That’s a big relief for me.” Dustin R. Hurshman, IT Analyst III, City of Thousand Oaks

4

Recovering data eightfold fasterWhat users do know is that the IT department is now able to respond to requests to restore lost data in one hour, instead of a day or more. “We’re using Dell Compellent Data Instant Replays to take point-in-time snapshots on the SAN, and that has made recovery a lot easier for us,” says Hurshman. “With direct-attached storage, we only had tape backups, so if a user needed a file recovered, we would have to recall the tape from our off-site storage facility. It was at a minimum a one-day turnaround, sometimes two.”

Restore requests come in about once a week. “Now we can have data restored for users within an hour—however far back the user wants it—using Dell Compellent Replays,” says Hurshman. “We’re providing better service and saving IT staff time as well.”

86% less administration time requiredWith limited IT headcount, the city wanted a storage solution that would be easy to manage. “I’m the only one with storage administration responsibilities, and I had no previous SAN experience before Dell Compellent,” says Hurshman. “I still found it very easy to navigate through Dell Compellent Enterprise Manager. I have no trouble understanding what’s going on with the SAN, and I can be more efficient, because I can look at everything in one place. We spend roughly a half hour per week on storage management now, compared to between three and four hours a week previously. With direct-attached storage, we had to constantly monitor our disk usage.”

When Hurshman does need to train other technicians on the Dell Compellent SAN, he’s confident that the knowledge transfer will go smoothly. “I’ve already trained a couple of other admins on how to do the Replays for data recovery,” he says.

Although the city has not had any issues with the SAN, it’s in good hands with Dell Compellent Copilot Support. “I know that capable engineers are just a phone call away if we need assistance, and it’s a testament to the quality of the solution that we haven’t yet had any need for support,” says Hurshman.

Paving the way for virtualizationWith centralized storage, the city is now free to reap the many benefits of server virtualization. “As we virtualize more of our servers, we’ll be relying on the Dell Compellent SAN even more,” says Hurshman. “Virtualization will reduce our energy consumption as well as our physical hardware footprint. I don’t have any concerns about the reliability of the Dell Compellent SAN. Now we can virtualize with confidence.”

Zero SAN-related downtimeSo far, there has been no downtime for the Dell Compellent SAN. “I’ve been more than happy with our decision to go with Dell Compellent,” says Hurshman. “We haven’t had any issues since we put it in. The data is always there, no matter what. That’s a big relief for me as our servers age. There’s so much redundancy built into the Dell Compellent SAN, I don’t have to worry that if a server goes down, all the data will go with it.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit dell.com/servicedescriptions © April 2012. Microsoft and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties - express or implied - in this case study. Reference number 10010360

View all Dell case studies at dell.com/casestudies