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Kanatek successfully completed a major back up project at McGill University , which included Novell servers. For more information read the McGill Case Study.
A high-end Storage Area Network (SAN) solution provided by Kanatek included storage from Hitachi Data Systems that offered the ability to control storage locally, but manage clients centrally. Existing Novell, Solaris, and NT/Windows servers were all on the SAN.
The client's IT group, working with Kanatek, implemented a SAN with 16 hosts that carried 8TB of usable data and improved the I/O performance 20-30% over the fibre backbone. There used to be occasional Array failures when they were standalone but now that they are all on the SAN, there have been no failures, better quality performance and higher availability. The department is seeing the benefits from caching with faster discs and the SAN also offers easy allocation of new storage. Lost power to the machine room would, in the past, have meant a 10-20% failure rate in the machines. Recently, there was a power failure and the machines on the SAN were recovered, without a single disc failure. Everything came back normally.
Earl Lindberg, Senior Analyst at McGill, recalled, “The SAN went in smoothly and now it's working wonderfully. It is delivering all that it is supposed to. The SAN went in quicker than the Backup project and we were impressed with the Hitachi/Kanatek relationship. Kanatek did a very good job at presenting the solution. The machines have very limited maintenance windows so it's difficult to find the time to do the work, but Kanatek worked around the issues. The Kanatek employees were very knowledgeable and focused on getting the job done. The continuity of staff, from one project to the next, made a lot of sense.”
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