IBM Case Study

Carilion Clinic deploys highly available

storage for Microsoft Exchange with
IBM XIV

Overview

■ Challenge
Create a low-maintenance stor-
age platform, capable of sup-
porting 12,500 Microsoft
Exchange mailboxes and pro-
viding 24/7 availability.
■ Solution
Implemented two
IBM XIV Storage Systems—
a full-rack 79 TB model for pro-
duction and a half-rack 47 TB
model for disaster recovery.
Began migrating users from Carilion Clinic is a not-for-profit organi- “ We went ahead with
GroupWise to Microsoft zation that owns and operates eight
Exchange Server 2007. the proof-of-concept,
hospitals and more than 100 doctor
■ Benefits
practices in southwest Virginia. With
and we really liked
Low maintenance: administra-
more than one million people in its serv- what we saw. Not only
tive workload for storage provi-
ice area, the company focuses on clini- did the XIV deliver in
sioning has been reduced by
cal care, education and research, and terms of performance
80 percent. High resilience: if a
also provides laboratory services for
disk fails, XIV can automatically and resilience—we also
other healthcare organizations. Carilion
rebuild it within 30 minutes,
employs 12,500 people and generates
found it much simpler
without disrupting users. Low
annual revenues of $2.17 billion. to manage than our
TCO: advanced features like
existing systems.”
remote mirroring are included
“We’re a large organization, we have
— Chris Painter, Storage Team
as standard.
numerous locations across southwest Lead, Carilion Clinic
Virginia and, of course, our hospitals
operate 24/7,” explains Mahesh Tailor,
Manager, Technical Services at Carilion
Clinic. “To help our employees commu-
nicate effectively, we rely on our e-mail
systems—and we have to keep them
online at all times.”
To modernize and enhance its email service, the company decided to migrate all
12,500 users from the existing Novell GroupWise platform to a Microsoft®
Exchange Server 2007 environment.

“With the release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, we felt that Microsoft now
offered the right choice for our business,” comments Mahesh Tailor. “It’s a true
64-bit solution, and much more efficient and scalable than the 2003 version. Going
forward, we were more confident in the Microsoft offering than our existing Novell
GroupWise solution.”

As well as requiring 12 new servers, the Exchange environment would also need to
access large volumes of data at high speed—so the company began looking for a
suitable storage solution.

Reducing storage complexity

“We were already using SAN and storage virtualization technologies to manage
the data for our existing IT systems, and managing all the RAID arrays and storage
volumes was quite labor-intensive,” says Chris Painter, Storage Team Lead at
Carilion Clinic. “With the new Exchange environment, we didn’t want to add to the
complexity of what we already had: we wanted a low-maintenance solution that
would still deliver tier-one performance and be resilient enough to provide
24/7 availability.”

The company considered various products and was intrigued by the IBM XIV®
Storage System—a revolutionary new SAN concept. The XIV system is based on a
grid of standard, off-the-shelf hardware components connected in any-to-any
topology by means of massively paralleled Gigabit Ethernet and contained within a
single chassis. Its ground-breaking architecture delivers tier-one performance levels
and provides up to 79 TB of storage capacity at a tier-two price point.

Data is automatically spread across the available disks, and all disks are mirrored to
provide full redundancy. If an individual disk fails, the XIV system automatically
rebuilds the mirror with a functioning disk—providing rapid autonomic self-healing,
with no need for manual input from the IT team. A 1 TB disk can be fully rebuilt in
around 30 minutes, significantly reducing the risk of data loss and business
disruption.

“Although it’s a relatively new and leading-edge solution, XIV has already been
approved by the Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) for
storage,” says Chris Painter. “This gave us a lot of confidence that it would be a
good choice for our new environment.”
Resilience and availability
Solution Components
“One of the biggest concerns with most modern storage systems is that as disks
become larger, it takes longer and longer to rebuild them when they fail,” says Hardware

Mahesh Tailor. “A 1 TB disk can take eight hours to rebuild, during which time there ● IBM XIV® Storage System
can be performance problems, downtime, and even a risk of data loss. The idea
that the XIV Storage System can automatically rebuild a failed disk within half an
hour—and even recover a whole tray of disks without any downtime—was very
attractive to us.”

Carilion was eager to find out whether the XIV system could deliver on this promise
and also wanted to test its performance: most of its existing SAN storage used
expensive fiber-channel disks, and the company wanted to see if the XIV’s SATA
disks could deliver comparable I/O speeds. IBM offered to perform a proof-of-
concept to demonstrate the potential of the solution.

Proving the concept

“We went ahead with the proof-of-concept, and we really liked what we saw,”
comments Chris Painter. “Not only did the XIV deliver in terms of performance and
resilience—we also found it much simpler to manage than our existing systems. It’s
pretty much a ‘black box’ solution: you just specify how much space you need and
then allocate it to a server; there’s no need to worry about RAID configuration or
any of the traditional complexities of SAN storage.”

As a result, Carilion found that it could provision new storage pools in the
XIV approximately 70 to 80 percent faster than in its existing SAN—significantly
reducing operational costs.

Reducing TCO
“Ongoing cost-efficiency is an important point,” says Chris Painter. “With the
IBM XIV, we spend less time on storage management and no time at all on physical
maintenance: if a disk fails, it ‘calls home,’ and an IBM engineer comes out to
replace it. In the meantime, the system automatically heals itself, so there’s no dis-
ruption and no need for our IT staff to do anything.”

Mahesh Tailor adds: “From the point of view of acquisition costs, the XIV also made
sense for us. Compared to adding another 79 TB to our existing virtualized SAN,
the XIV system was very competitive. Moreover, the XIV system includes advanced
software such as remote mirroring and snapshot tools as standard. With most stor-
age systems, you have to buy extra licenses if you want to use these features.”
Rapid implementation © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009
IBM Systems and Technology Group
As a result of all these considerations, Carilion decided to go ahead with the proj-
Route 100
ect, and implemented two XIV systems—a full-rack 79 TB model for production Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
and a half-rack 47 TB model for disaster recovery, located at a second data center.
Produced in the United States of America
November 2009
“The installation and setup of the XIV hardware was quick and easy, and we have All Rights Reserved

been able to set up the new Exchange environment without problems. We have IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and XIV are
trademarks or registered trademarks of
about 2,500 users online at the moment, and our next step is to migrate the other International Business Machines Corporation in
10,000 onto the platform.” the United States, other countries, or both. If
these and other IBM trademarked terms are
marked on their first occurrence in this
Leading-edge features information with a trademark symbol (® or ™),
these symbols indicate U.S. registered or
Carilion is taking advantage of an advanced XIV feature known as “thin provision- common law trademarks owned by IBM at the
ing”, which allows the IT team to create logical volumes that are larger than the time this information was published. Such
trademarks may also be registered or common
total capacity of the existing XIV system. As the environment grows, the company law trademarks in other countries. A current list
will simply be able to buy additional XIV systems and merge them into the of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at
“Copyright and trademark information” at
volume—without needing to shut down the whole SAN and manually resize the ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.
volume. This will help to deliver seamless scalability for the Exchange environment Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft
Corporation in the United States, other
in the future.
countries, or both.
Other product, company or service names may
In the near future, Carilion will set up remote mirroring between the XIV systems at be trademarks or service marks of others.
References in this publication to IBM products,
its main and secondary data centers—providing an additional layer of protection
programs or services do not imply that
against disaster. IBM intends to make these available in all
countries in which IBM operates. Any reference
to an IBM product, program or service is not
Mahesh Tailor concludes: “Our XIV solution offers several unique advantages in intended to imply that only IBM’s product,
program or service may be used. Any
terms of price performance and ease of management. Moreover, for resilience and
functionally equivalent product, program or
availability, most traditional SAN solutions can’t even come close. Going forward, service may be used instead. Offerings are
subject to change, extension or withdrawal
we are giving serious consideration to the idea of moving more of our storage infra-
without notice.
structure onto the XIV platform.” All client examples cited represent how some
clients have used IBM products and the results
they may have achieved. Performance data for
For more information IBM and non-IBM products and services
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at: contained in this document was derived under
specific operating and environmental conditions.
ibm.com/systems/storage The actual results obtained by any party
implementing such products or services will
depend on a large number of factors specific to
For more information about Carilion Clinic visit: www.carilionclinic.org/ such party’s operating environment and may
vary significantly. IBM makes no representation
that these results can be expected or obtained
in any implementation of any such products or
services.
THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS
PROVIDED “AS-IS” WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR
IMPLIED.

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