Streamlining storage

The data on hand at MasterCard International mounted up year after year as the credit and debit card giant extended its services to tens of millions of customers. “It just grew by leaps and bounds,” says an amazed Jim Hull, MasterCard’s vice president of engineering services.

Hull struggled to manage the data with multiple legacy storage systems. The problem’s resolution, he says, was deployment of SANs to collect data from diverse systems and enable efficient management across multiple systems.

“We saw a huge amount of data in multiple systems, and the attitude was that ‘the resources in my mainframe world can’t be shared with your system because my resources are only attached to the mainframe,’ ” Hull explains. “With the technology of SANs, we would have storage pooled.”

For Hull and other chief technologists, moving from multiple legacy storage systems — including DAS (Direct-Attached Storage) that hooked directly to individual servers — brought consolidated and better-managed data storage. The move saved time and money  and brought IT staffers into closer collaboration.

Just as importantly, chief technologists value SANs for saving money during budget tightening, according to industry analysts. Nicole Felker, a research analyst for the storage systems program at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, says enterprises are finding ways to maximize what storage systems they have.

“Companies have excess capacity, and funds are also tight, so they are buying just enough to get them by,” she says. “There are big savings in storage consolidation, which is being done by putting servers in SANs systems.”

Moving to SANs

The details differ, but IT leaders such as Hull; Jim Janey, chief technologist and vice president of architecture at Whirlpool in Benton Harbor, Mich.; and Harold Durnford, storage systems manager at Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada, all opted to move to unified SANs technology.

MasterCard’s Hull standardized on EMC’s Symetrix Enterprise system and transfer data residing on legacy systems from Hitachi , Sun Microsystems, Amdahl, and IBM. “We wanted to keep from using multiple vendors,” he says. “At the time, we were building a new datacenter in St. Louis , and we needed to keep our old and new datacenters in sync, and EMC’s Symetrix Remote Data Facility allowed us to copy the data.”

The Purchase, N.Y.-based MasterCard continues to migrate legacy systems to the SANs platform, using EMC software packages such as PowerPath. “This is not an overnight venture,” Hull explains. The financial services company, which reported $1.7 billion in revenue in 2001, also used IBM Tivoli software to back up data on tape.

Whirlpool’s Janey moved toward more unified and efficient storage systems as well, using an IBM solution.

“The way the economy is in the white goods industry of refrigerators, dryers, and washing machines, it’s been tough for the industry,” he says. “So efficiency is important on the IT side. We’ve been doing a lot of consolidation, and as we look at 2003. [The company board of directors] expect efficiencies to keep costs down. Storage was an area we attacked.”

Through the years, a series of legacy systems grew up almost autonomously, with individual platforms of computing systems running different systems, Janey says.

“But with storage growing from 5 [percent] to 20 percent a year, with silos for each computing platform, it’s been getting harder and harder to manage it,” Janey explains. “In 2002, we felt that the technology was ready, and we were at a stage in the lifecycle of a lot of our storage that it was time to replenish it.”

Whirlpool deployed IBM’s Enterprise Storage Server, called Shark, and IBM’s Tivoli management software. “We decided we would make all storage networked, based on Shark technology, and all our platforms would connect into the storage network,” Janey says.

Scalability isn’t the only issue pushing CTOs to reconfigure their storage networks. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 heightened concerns about storage backup and recovery, and the opportunities presented by moving to SANs make backup strategies easier, IT executives say.

At MasterCard, Hull has used IBM’s Tivoli solution for tape backup as well as EMC’s TimeFinder software to build backup copies of the company’s Oracle databases during run time. According to Hull , the practice saved hours, if not days, of valuable backup time.

Whirlpool’s Janey also relies on Tivoli . The system automates backup processes across Whirlpool’s different platforms. “Tivoli Storage Manager does all the backup, and the [related] software manages the environment,” he says. Royal Bank’s Durnford also deploys IBM’s Tivoli storage management software to back up tapes.

Cautionary tales

Storage can become an issue  outside of technolgy if not managed carefully. When implementing a SAN strategy, IT execs should take care that everyone is on board as details are ironed out, according to those who have been through the process.

“For anybody getting into SANs , when you start hooking up different platforms, the largest hurdle is the people hurdle,” Janey says. “The technology folks often like silos — Unix silos, Intel silos. They control their environment. So when you start sharing [data] across platforms in SANs, you need to get the users involved. ‘You say, ‘This is where we are going, and these are the savings we are achieving, so get on board.’ ”

Additionally, for the company president to approve changes in storage strategy, the migration must be carried out without interrupting any services, says Dan Rosen, CTO of Cinesite, a Hollywood, Calif.- and London -based division of Eastman Kodak, which makes visual effects for movies.

“The challenge for us is to make sure the creative side [developing the company’s special effects] isn’t aware of any changes [in systems],” says Rosen, who deploys a combination of storage systems from IBM, BlueArc, and others to supply the high-bandwidth needs of the company’s diverse units.

BIG Results

Each of these IT executives say SANs were crucial in jump-starting their storage capabilities, thanks to faster response times and cost savings.

“We now have four or five IBM boxes on the floor behind SAP [business management software], and we’ve seen a 30 percent increase in response time in SAP transactions across the board,” Whirlpool’s Janey says.

But the benefits don’t end there. “For batch jobs, we’ve had a 50 [percent] to 60 percent reduction [in response time]. This year, we are starting to extend storage networks to other systems in the company,” Janey adds.

At the Royal Bank, Durnford says, “We’ve been able to scale a lot higher than before and to respond more quickly to business needs. It’s now a larger shared resource versus the islands we had before in the pre-SANs world with each server having storage. I think we saved money because we centralized a lot of activities.”

MasterCard’s Hull , meanwhile, points to SAN’s ability to efficiently handle a growing mountain of data storage. “In 1999, we had 30 terabytes of data on hand, and by 2002, we went to 2,000TB,” he says, adding that this is a trend not likely to reverse itself anytime soon, so efficient storage will continue to be of utmost importance.