CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Key Benefits • Improved system performance • Utilizes existing IP infrastructure • Improved architecture of server clustering • Support for multiple applications • Improved multimedia data storage system
XDP in Shanghai Selects Intransa IP SAN System for its Powerful, Unified Storage Solution. Business Challenge XDP of Shanghai is on the cutting edge of legal IT applications, including electronic evidence and video monitoring. With business growing at a rapid pace, they were experiencing serious network congestion and did not have the capacity to grow with their current DAS system. In addition, diverse data was scattered throughout the system, and critical information could not be shared between departments. Solution XDP did a comprehensive evaluation of storage options and chose Intransa’s IP SAN solution, which provided high performance, powerful and independent capacity expandability and ease of management, while supporting the company’s many independent storage applications. Xuhui District Procuratorate (XDP) is a pacesetter in technology applications for legal institutions in Shanghai and has been a pioneer in digital case handling, office automation and other related applications. Its customers rely on them for a variety of diversified applications, including special case dossier systems and electronic evidence and video monitoring. With the digitization of huge amounts of data, XDP was experiencing difficulty storing, managing and retrieving data. XDP was relying on Direct Attached Storage (DAS), with seven servers, two industrial control computers and multiple workstations with storage equipment distributed on each host. A variety of data was scattered at different locations throughout the system and information could not be shared between departments. This limiting solution resulted in serious network congestion and hampered operational efficiency. With this type of environment, it was impossible to implement a unified management structure and the level of information security and utilization ratios of stored resources were dangerously low. These problems, coupled with the rapidly increasing amount of data processed by XDP, had placed increasingly urgent requirements on storage capacity. XDP’s current DAS solution provided little expandability and was not able to meet growing demand. They needed a change quickly.
The Trial Begins XDP looked at a variety of options and knew the solution they chose had to support their existing MSCS management system for clustered storage and their Microsoft® SQL database service. Their current system was not performing at a level they needed and they wanted to replace it as well. XDP knew from experience that DAS does not provide the expandability and performance they needed. Network Attached Storage (NAS) is mainly used to provide file service and does not provide the level of performance required, while FC SAN, using special-purpose network and protocols, is complicated to manage and is restricted in disaster-tolerance distance. XDP discovered that IP SAN has the advantage of simplified configuration management of an IP network, while providing the powerful capabilities and expandability of the SAN architecture. IP SAN also provides powerful network storage for the entire cluster system. It can support current storage requirements and ensure powerful and independent expandability in applications, performance and capacity.
CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Service Workstations
Video Edit Workstations
“Intransa provided the full expandability and performance we needed, at an extremely attractive price point.” – Wang Daxie, Chief for IT Applications, Xuhui District Procuratorate
AD/DNS Exchange
C fo on rS n er ect ve ion rs
Diskless Terminal Boot Server C fo on r W ne or ctio ks n ta tio n
IP SAN
1000M Switch s
Diskless Terminal Network
IP SAN Supports a Multimedia Powerhouse
Backbone 1000M Switch
Database Cluster/ Media & Video Servers
All functions of XDP’s original storage system have been replaced with Intransa’s IP SAN cluster. In addition to supporting their existing MSCS system, it supports up to eight hosts, a vast improvement over the previous two, providing XDP with powerful network storage for the entire cluster system.
Intransa IP SAN Storage System
Diskless Terminal
The Jury Is In
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After a comprehensive evaluation, XDP incorporated the Intransa IP SAN storage system, based on its outstanding performance and powerful expandability. “Intransa provided the full expandability and performance we needed, at an extremely attractive price point,” said Wang Daxie, chief for IT applications at XDP. “Moreover, it’s easy to manage and can fit seamlessly into our environment. With Intransa’s IP SAN, we have built a highly efficient system that can expand our storage and network transmission capability whenever it’s needed.”
Previously XDP’s multimedia system mainly consisted of two parts, video editing and multimedia storage. Multimedia files processed by video editing were stored on CD-ROMs through the multimedia server, resulting in slow access speed and a high failure rate. Using the Intransa IP SAN to support their multimedia storage system, data is now directly stored on disk arrays, providing much better performance and directly supporting nonlinear editing on video workstations. In addition, the entire system, including diskless workstations, shares one data storage system. Therefore, file storage support provided by the Intransa system is made available to all client computers through the multimedia server. The new Intransa IP SAN storage system has brought about significant improvement in response speed and manageability of the entire XDP multimedia storage system.
The Verdict
Tangible Results
Intransa’s IP SAN solution has brought significant improvement in several areas, including improved system performance and increased utilization of storage resources. With deployment of the Intransa IP SAN, all computing structures now share the same storage architecture. Connection of all servers, workstations and client computers through the network to Intransa’s IP SAN not only facilitates sharing of stored resources, but also unified storage management, providing better storage service for all components.
With the deployment of Intransa’s IP SAN system, XDP has quickly realized that their new network storage architecture significantly increases the operational efficiency of their existing IT system and reduces the cost and complexity of management.
Intransa’s IP SAN solution uses iSCSI protocols and directly provides application storage space through the network. A single system provides up to 24TB of storage space, yet can grow to 1,500TB of RAID protected, fault tolerant storage. Moreover, the huge storage resource can be shared by all applications and all users, greatly increasing XDP’s resource utilization ratio. Intransa’s IP SAN also uses peer-to-peer communication mode and bypasses the terminal server, thus helping overcome the servers’ computing bottleneck.
“Our storage resources were previously in an isolated status. The utilization ratio was low and so was the system performance,” said Daxie. “With implementation of support for all host storage space through Intransa’s IP SAN solution, we have made breakthroughs in many storage applications and have brought vitality to the entire IT system.” Intransa’s IP SAN has provided a sound foundation for future expansion of XDP’s storage capacity and network bandwidth. According to XDP, the most outstanding feature of the solution is that the IP SAN network storage architecture is based on the network disk-computing architecture already in place, resulting in significant time and cost savings.
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