Add Sales With PCI-Based Storage Solutions

Would you like to offer your customers a less-expensive storage connectivity alternative to Fibre Channel? Gold Coast Networks recently did just that for the Texas Tech University Rawls College of Business. Gold Coast is an integrator that started out in security and engineering, but now is experiencing 85% annual sales growth as a result of shifting its focus to storage technologies. Jeff Summerlin, president of Gold Coast, says many of the company’s storage projects are a result of leads from vendor partners. It was one such lead that led to an IP (Internet Protocol)-based storage project at Texas Tech.

The institution was looking for an inexpensive way to back up hundreds of PCs containing professors’ research data to a central disk repository. The professors were responsible for managing their data and assuring it was properly backed up. In many cases, data backup wasn’t happening at all. Lost data meant lost hours of research. Texas Tech determined disk-based storage solutions from major storage vendors to be cost prohibitive due to the $3,000 per TB starting price. The school’s IT department discovered P-SAN on the JMR Web site with an approximate cost of $1,500 per TB. JMR passed the lead to Gold Coast and worked with the integrator to design and implement the P-SAN system.

P-SAN is a storage system with the capability to connect to the network as an extension of the standard PCI bus on personal computers. P-SAN eliminates the need for fiber optic cabling to connect SAN (storage area network) components. Instead, P-SAN uses TCP/IP (an open computer communications language) and standard Category 5 Ethernet cabling to connect to the network. The storage industry refers to this practice as IP storage. The result is a significant cost savings due to the elimination of expensive fiber optic components. The term secondary storage refers to disk-based storage used for purposes other than live production data storage applications. Disk-based backup is an example of secondary storage.

Evaluation System Helps Win Storage Sale
JMR and Gold Coast furnished Texas Tech with a P-SAN evaluation unit. Texas Tech was impressed by the cost and performance of the P-SAN and purchased a second storage shelf for a total of 24 TB of storage space. When Texas Tech implemented the P-SAN, it centralized the backup process so that all professors’ research data was backed up. If a data restore is required, a point-and-click from the storage administrator is all that is needed to recover the data — a process that takes much less time than a conventional tape backup system recovery. Gold Coast performed the network integration of the P-SAN, which involved connecting the storage unit to the storage network. The Texas Tech IT staff was able to perform the ILM (information lifecycle management) software configuration. The entire installation was complete in two days. Minimal training was required because the university’s backup software runs on the Windows 2003 OS. Going forward, Gold Coast will reap additional sales as Texas Tech plans to add more P-SAN units in other areas of the campus.

www.jmr.com

www.gc-networks.com