ADIC'S Scalar 10K helps Cummins consolidate San backup: a case study.

The ADIC Scalar 10K storage networking library's capacity-on-demand scalability and intelligent storage network management capabilities are helping Cummins Inc. consolidate its corporate backup into a single, manageable system.

The Cummins IT organization has seen data explode over the last two years, as the Fortune 500 supplier of power generation products has expanded electronic communications, digital asset management, CRM, ERP, and data warehousing applications to enhance its position as a global market leader.

"As data increased, we simply outgrew our SCSI backup system and the smaller libraries that were part of it," said Chris Price, Cummins Computing Services Director. "When we decided to consolidate backup in a SAN environment, we looked at the options and selected the ADIC Scalar 10K as our central library, starting out with a 35-drive, 1900-cartridge LTO configuration. The Scalar 10K was built for consolidating backup in SANs, giving us clear economic, management and architectural advantages. It lets us grow our system as our data increases, and it was the clear choice for the lowest total cost of ownership."

Cummins' IT department deployed a centralized SAN that consolidates data for nearly 300 heterogeneous servers into a multi-tiered backup system. In the new configuration, most of the servers located in the Columbus, Indiana, headquarters and nearby manufacturing plants send data over a separate Gb Ethernet backup network to three media servers, one of which serves as the Veritas NetBackup master server. Then, the media servers and the largest of the local application servers send their data to the Scalar 10K library through a Brocade switched fabric.

"The Scalar 10K's storage networking management tools helped us create an architecture that makes management easier and gives us better data security. It lets us create pools of drives for sharing among different servers, and the library's SAN Firewall manager protects our data by making sure that no server can access data outside its drive pool. Library security also ensures that rogue servers can't see any of the drives at all," said Art Bitts, Cummins Senior Systems Engineer. The Cummins architecture overlaps and tiers server access: the master media server can see all drives, the secondary media servers can each see half the drives, and the production servers can see the drives in one of four pools. Drive sharing between servers within each pool is managed by NetBackup.

"We have the best of both worlds," said Mr. Bitts. "The ADIC Management Console gives us security and large-scale pooling, and Veritas' shared storage option (SSO) gives us more granular drive sharing within the pools. It's a very effective load balancing architecture."

The capacity of the Scalar 10K and its capacity-on-demand deployment model were both important for Cummins since data growth was certain but unpredictable. The initial library can hold 190 terabytes native and house 35 LTO drives, but with several terabytes a day being backed up, they are planning for growth. "We selected a capacity-on-demand Scalar 10K to help us manage expansion--this is the only library we saw with this option," said Mr. Price. "We can add tape positions in small increments to more than double our present capacity, and add drives as we need more performance. A great benefit is that we can add to the system whenever we want using a software key--and we don't pay for any of the upgrades until we actually implement them. It gives us very effective budget control."

Overall, the Cummins team found the Scalar 10K provided the lowest total ownership costs of all the libraries they considered. "We did a detailed analysis," explained Mr. Price, "looking at costs associated with initial acquisition, later expansion, system management, and the impact on total system cost. The Scalar 10K was the clear choice."

Options considered, but ultimately rejected, included libraries that attached Fibre Channel interface drives directly to the fabric. "Because the Scalar 10K provides a managed, aggregated drive interface, we had fewer connections to handle and needed fewer switch ports. It made our system easier to manage and was more cost-effective from a total system viewpoint."