CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Key Benefits • Provision application server independent storage • Uniformity and consolidation of storage resources • LAN-free, nearline backup and restore • True DR preparedness with Asynchronous Replication • Buy-as-you-grow scalability
MphasiS, the Top BPO Service Provider Chooses Intransa IP SAN to Consolidate Storage Resources and to Build a Comprehensive and Truly Online DR System. Business Challenge To assist MphasiS, a leading global IT and BPO services provider, to consolidate its distributed storage resources, provision server independent storage, speed up backup & restore performance and to significantly enhance its DR preparedness. Solution Migrate from a DAS environment to an IP based SAN solution using the Intransa IP SAN storage system for a low TCO and long term cost savings.
The Problem MphasiS, a fast growing IT and BPO services provider, assists its clients in innovating and streamlining their business processes by offering custom solutions for technology and operations outsourcing. The company’s expertise is focused on financial services, logistics and technology verticals and spans across architecture, application development and integration, application management and business process outsourcing, including the operation of large-scale customer contact centers. Besides an onsite presence at key locations around the globe, MphasiS has extensive offshore infrastructure for IT Development and Business Process Outsourcing with centers in China, Mexico and India. In India, MphasiS operates five centers, for offshore development and BPO services, spread across Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai and Mangalore. Interconnected to each other, over redundant leased lines and VPN networks, each centre is equipped with state-of-art IT infrastructure. With more than 1000 servers deployed across these locations, each with its own direct attached storage, performing storage management, backup and restore, and disaster recovery functions became a nightmare for the company’s IT administrators. Looking to consolidate its distributed storage resources and to implement a comprehensive, online DR system for compliance, MphasiS chose an Intransa IP SAN solution. “After a stringent evaluation exercise, we chose an IP SAN solution from Intransa having found it to be the best from a storage management perspective, especially in backup management” said Mr. Aditya Menon, Group CIO, MphasiS. With the IP SAN system in place, administrators can now backup and restore 200 GB of data in under one hour, provision server independent storage and replicate data asynchronously, locally or remotely, for DR compliance.
Zeroing in Intransa IP SAN “We evaluated a lot of storage solutions, including those built around Fibre Channel and NAS based platforms, but ultimately decided to go for an IP SAN solution from Intransa. We found that Intransa’s IP SAN solution addressed our storage pain points comprehensively and interestingly, had a low initial TCO as well,” avers Mr. Menon.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Exchange Cluster
“The Intransa IP SAN has helped bring uniformity and moduOracle Applications
File Servers
Stor Control Management Station
Storage Controller
larity to our global storage infrastructure. We will now be able to have storage consolidation with application server independent storage provisioning and constant data availability from IP SAN, execute speedier LAN free backup and restore functions, facilitate smooth & reliable DR operations, perform online data replication and simplify data management across the organization at a significantly lower TCO than an FC SAN.”
Software Development
– Aditya Menon, CEO , MphasiS
IP SAN
Intransa IP SAN Storage System Disk Enclosure
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MphasiS implemented an Intransa IP SAN system at each of its five centers in India. Each IP SAN system consists of a Storage Controller, StorControl® Storage Management Software and a Disk Enclosure that can currently store up to 2 TB of data. “With Gigabit Ethernet we can have even faster access to our servers as the server can be directly plugged in to the IP SAN ports. This makes the IP SAN much faster and data retrieval is almost comparable to that of an FC SAN,” says Mr. Menon.
Business and IT Benefits The Intransa IP SAN topology offers an application server that is independent of storage and data services. Instead of loading applications on each server, as was the case under the previous DAS environment, IT administrators can now install application directly onto the IP SAN. This way, even if an application server does go down there would be no service outage that is visible to the users on the network. Administrators could simply, with a click of a mouse, reprovision the application that is still available on the IP SAN system to another host on the network and the users would continue to enjoy access to the application, seamlessly. Utilizing the IP SAN architecture, administrators can now run full backups quickly and directly onto the IP SAN by creating “Snapshot” or “point-in-time” copies of the data. In addition to simplifying backup, this approach enables instantaneous restores from disk via mounting the snapshot volume. The IP SAN also enables the continually growing backup log files to be kept online, thereby facilitating quick identification of archived data for restoration. Administrators can now retrieve 200 GB of backed up data in less than one hour compared to
several hours with the previous DAS configuration. Furthermore, the snapshot home directory can now be setup so that users can complete restoration on their own instantly, significantly reducing help desk requests and thereby allowing IT technicians to spend their time on other projects. Additionally, with backups being run directly on the back-end storage network rather than the user-facing front-end network, as was the case in the previous DAS environment, there is no network congestion or slow down of IT infrastructure. With StorAR, an advanced feature of the Intransa management software, administrators can easily replicate data asynchronously from one storage controller to another – locally or remotely – to satisfy the company’s business continuity and DR policies as well as external data compliance regulations.
Delivering “Buy-as-you-grow”scalability With IP SAN, MphasiS can now implement a truly cost effective and technologically advanced DR solution with the already available TCP/IP skill sets of its IT administrators. Intransa delivers a scalable storage grid solution by separating the RAID controller functionality and disk subsystem into two distinct components that can be scaled independently of each other. The RAID functionality is provided by Intransa’s storage controllers that provide N-Way scaling of up to four controllers in a cluster, providing scalable performance, dynamic load balancing across the cluster, and increasing the survivability of the controllers. The N-Way cluster is represented to the application servers as a single, logical controller represented by a single IP address. When the storage enclosures are expanded to meet demand, all storage behind the controllers can take advantage of the scaling SC performance. The Intransa storage grid solution utilizes customers’ existing Ethernet and IP infrastructure, decreasing TCO and acquisition costs of the storage solution. “We expect to save at least $20,000 during phase one of the IP SAN implementation,” confirms Mr. Menon.
Intransa StorAlliance Technology Partners integrating with Intransa external IP storage solutions include more than 40 physical security vendor’s products plus those of more than 35 IT vendors. Intransa StorPartner Security Integrators offer complete video surveillance and other solutions to meet the most challenging customer needs.
Intransa, Inc., Corporate Headquarters 2870 Zanker Road, MS 200, San Jose, CA 95134 T: 408.678.8600 • 866.446.8726 • F: 408.678.8800 www.intransa.com • sales@intransa.com