Trimble Migrates from Direct Attached Storage to iSCSI

Enterprise Networks & Servers, May 2004

With more than 500 products, Trimble, Inc. has developed position-centric solutions to some of the world's most complex problems. By integrating Global Positioning Systems (GPS) with wireless communication and information technology, Trimble technology has made its way into cars, airplanes, construction equipment, farm machinery, survey equipment, and PDAs. Other applications include dispatching and tracking emergency vehicles, surveying and building roads, and mapping earthquake damage.

Trimble traditionally relied on a direct attached storage (DAS) environment to support critical business applications such as MS Exchange, which provides messaging to the company's 2,000 worldwide employees, and Oracle 11i, the database maintaining Trimble's growing list of customers.

But business expansion created storage complexities; the company's DAS-based environment was becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to manage. Backup and restore times for MS Exchange were growing, causing disruptions and impacting productivity. And hosting multiple versions of the company's database was proving to be wasteful on storage, leaving a significant number of dead, rotating disks and requiring the continuous addition of new servers.

Shawn Wilde, Trimble's Worldwide Director of IS Operations, felt that the company had outgrown its DAS storage infrastructure. Determined to be more economical with Trimble's storage, Wilde decided it was time to consider a centralized storage solution to support future growth.

Wilde weighed his options in its move to a storage area network (SAN) and selected iSCSI, an IP-based SAN that relies on standard Ethernet components. This new technology would provide higher levels of data availability, increased scalability, and greater utilization with simplified management. iSCSI also promised to give Trimble the LAN-free storage back up it was looking for.

Price was a key consideration in weighing the alternatives. Wilde found that the cost of entry for iSCSI was significantly lower than other technologies - at minimum 30 percent lower in product costs alone, by some industry estimates. Total cost of ownership studies also favored iSCSI for Trimble's needs. Because iSCSI requires no specialized IT expertise or personnel, Wilde could expect a short learning curve from Trimble's already over-burdened IT staff.

"i"The components, the infrastructure, and the management tools for iSCSI are all based on SCSI and Ethernet standards that are well understood, and this represented significant savings."

Wilde admits that it was this familiarity and ease of use of the iSCSI technology that ultimately brought this class of storage into his business plan. "From a purely technology adoption point of view, iSCSI represented the total lowest cost of entry for us," said Wilde.

Betting on Reputation

After evaluating the iSCSI market, Trimble opted for an Adaptee iSCSI host bus adapter, citing Adaptee's solid reputation and track record. "Adaptee wrote the book on SCSI and they came in as a trusted vendor," said Wilde. Adaptee also suggested that Trimble bring in NetApps' external network attached storage (NAS) box.

iSCSI instantly addressed one of Wilde's main concerns with an all-DAS environment: network downtime. With the Adaptee iSCSI SAN, Trimble was able to back up MS Exchange at the SAN level with zero impact to the network. Trimble also tested the Adaptee iSCSI SAN on its Oracle 1 Ii database. Five full instances of the Oracle database run at any given time - each at different points in the development process - allowing the IT group to continually test patches and make enhancements.

A steady stream of new releases must be coordinated and Trimble database administrators (DBAs) had been spending an inordinate amount of time moving data to different systems to manage the development process. With iSCSI, Wilde estimates that Trimble's DBAs have reduced development time by as much as 25 percent.

"We've pounded data in and out of servers and the iSCSI array, and Adaptee has come through with flying colors," said Wilde. And, according to Wilde, no news is goods news. To date, he has had no trouble reports, no calls about technical issues, and no complaints about the iSCSI SAN deployment.

Wilde says he's satisfied that iSCSI is the best solution for a company of Trimble's size and infrastructure. "iSCSI is the way to go for middle market companies coming up out of a DAS environment with SCSI knowledge and experience to leverage," he said.