Nexsan Technologies

STORAGE SHOWDOWN

If data is the lifeblood of organizations, then how important are the devices and software that store and manage it? While the answer is "invaluable," you might reach this conclusion only after you've experienced downtime.

Integrated Solutions, February 2002 | Written by Ed Hess

After more than 20 hours of no sleep and lots of coffee, Brian Ritchie, supervisor of publishing systems at the The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), wanted to be sure he clearly understood the directions coming from his vendor's technical support hotline. "I'm supposed to yank the hard drives from my failed tower, put them in the tower that is still functioning, and then reboot the system," he said, repeating the instructions that had just been supplied by the tech at the other end of the line.

"That's right," assured the tech support confidently.

Now on his knees, Ritchie began to carry out the advice of the support desk. One by one, he removed the hard drives that contained current and archived advertisements that run in the daily newspaper. Slipping the hard drives into the still functioning tower, Ritchie was well aware of his predicament - without access to ad materials, the newspaper would be incomplete as it headed to press. With the hard drives secure in their new home, the moment of truth arrived as Ritchie rebooted the system. After a few promising seconds, the second tower crashed - and, the deadline loomed even greater.

When it comes to hype, mass storage solutions garner much less attention than the buzzword-laden applications they support. Talk to Ritchie about the importance of his company's storage systems; however, and it's clear he considers them to be much more than a supporting technology. He knows data is the lifeblood of his organization and understands the importance of the hardware and software that houses this data and makes it available to end users. If you haven't quite embraced this concept, then think about the business impact of not having access to your company's most critical data. For The Plain Dealer, that means 800,000 daily readers won't get a complete

newspaper. For other organizations, it might mean losing orders, annoying customers, or turning off partners. In short, when mass storage solutions go down, revenue follows suit. Data Center Systems Drive Publishing Company

By the time The Plain Dealer opened its new corporate headquarters in February 2001, planning for the company's publishing data center had been underway for quite some time. The center, protected by several security systems, brings editorial, advertisement, and pagination storage and applications within four walls on the third floor of the company's shiny headquarters. The editorial information is the current and archived articles that will appear or have already run in the pages of The Plain Dealer. The graphic-intensive advertisement data is used to compose and place the ads that run in the paper and generate revenue for the company. The Web-based output system allows the newspaper, once composed, to be transmitted to the company's Tiedeman Production and Distribution Center in Brooklyn, Ohio. The importance of the data in the center is immediately clear. "If any one of these systems fails, getting the paper out becomes much more difficult," states Ritchie succinctly. "That's what we were facing when our second tower (which contained the advertisement data) crashed. We were facing a situation where not all ads would appear in the paper, and that can't ever happen."

To keep the editorial flowing from writers to readers, the data center uses a rack of servers and storage solutions from Sun Microsystems. This includes multiple servers that drive DLTtape systems that back up the Sun Fibre Channel RAID (redundant array of independent disks) arrays that house 30 drives (4 GB per drive) in each tower. The RAID and tape backup systems are both designed to promote maximum uptime and redundancy. The same can be said for the Web-based output solution that automatically tracks every newspaper page as it works its way through the production process. "As the pages are completed throughout the day, we send them electronically to our printing and distribution facility just outside of Cleveland. Our new Web-based system lets us track every page of the paper and know exactly where it is in the production process at all times," explains Ritchie. "This wasn't always the case. With our old system, there was some blind faith involved."

Mainframe Out, Client/Server In

The newspaper's new corporate headquarters was built adjacent to the company's existing facility. And, as employees settled into their new digs, a wrecking ball razed their old office space. Along with the building upgrade came an upgrade to The Plain Dealer's existing classified system, which was driven by a DEC 11/70 mainframe. However, not even a three-column classified ad could help find the old mainframe a new home. "We tried to give the old mainframe away, but there weren't any takers. It was just too old and too big for anyone to go through the trouble of taking it out of our old office," says Ritchie. "I came to work as crews were demolishing our old building, and the mainframe was just sitting on a ledge. When I came out for lunch, it was buried in the rubble."

With the new headquarters came a "new" mainframe system - a DEC 11/84 mainframe that already had some tough miles on it. Like its predecessor, this mainframe, too, was not long for this world. Concerns over ongoing maintenance costs and increasingly outdated technology led The Plain Dealer to invest in a new system to handle classified ad sales and content. "The DEC 11/84 needed to be housed in a separate room, removed from the data center. It also required us to direct connect each user to the system. It was a cabling nightmare," states Ritchie. The new system runs on the company's network. And, the storage components (Compaq StorageWorks devices with a capacity of 400 GB) can be neatly tucked away in the publishing data center.

Access Online Backup Data In Seconds
Walking through the company's publishing data center, Ritchie is still in a bit of disbelief when he recalls rebooting the advertisement storage system only to watch it crash seconds later. "We were pretty much at wit's end. The tech on the other line had no more advice for us, and we were pretty fed up with him anyway," recalls Ritchie.

As the printing deadline loomed, Ritchie contacted a local VAR in a last-ditch effort to get his system up and running. The VAR hustled to The Plain Dealer and introduced the IT staff to InfiniSAN, a disk array from Nexsan (Los Angeles). Once in the data center, the VAR's plan involved restoring the backup tape to the hard drives in the InfiniSAN array. Ritchie, who was both skeptical and desperate, OK'd the decision. After a couple of minutes loading data into the rack, the crew connected the system to the network and rebooted it. Within seconds, the monitors sprang to life, listing the advertisement files for a disbelieving IT staff. "We were thrilled, but that lasted about a minute," remembers Ritchie. "Then, we set about getting the ad data to our production people so the paper could get out on time."

The following days were much calmer as the postmortem took place. The newspaper's failed storage towers were repaired in short order, and the Nexsan product remained in place to back up the primary storage devices and provide online access to this backup data. As an added precautionary step, The Plain Dealer purchased an extended support plan from Nexsan. In addition to 24/7 phone support, Nexsan provided the paper with a spare rackmount unit with a hard drive. "If a hard drive fails, we already have a spare that is ready to load. If the Nexsan system goes down, we have an identical backup system just waiting to be brought online," explains Ritchie. In a quick demonstration, Ritchie swaps hard drives from the existing Nexsan product to the backup unit. Within minutes, the backup rackmount hums to life and the files appear on the monitor below it.

Many things have changed at The Plain Dealer in the past 12 months. The newspaper has upgraded its corporate headquarters as well as many of the IT applications and storage systems that drive the company. While coffee still remains the daily drink of choice for Ritchie, it can now be enjoyed leisurely - and not as liquid jolt to get him through another system-crashing nightmare.

Only a handful of Nexsan's (Los Angeles) many customers come to the company via the same route as The Plain Dealer newspaper - in the heat of an emergency. When the paper realized that its current storage system was not allowing access to advertisement data (specs and graphics), a grim realization hung in the air. Without this data, Cleveland's largest newspaper would have to run an incomplete edition of its paper. In short, this was a genuine crisis for The Plain Dealer.

On the advice of a local integration partner, the IT staff of The Plain Dealer implemented a product from Nexsan in an effort to quickly resolve the dilemma. After a quick implementation, the newspaper company was back up and running. The quick turnaround of fortune was due in large part to Nexsan's D2D (disk-to-disk) technology. "After two of our current RAID (redundant array of independent disks) units went down, we had little time or patience left. Our local integrator had a Nexsan RAID rack, so we got together and evaluated what options we had," recalls Brian Ritchie, supervisor of publishing systems at The Plain Dealer. "The concensus of our group was to restore the data backed up on tape to the hard drives in the Nexsan array. We followed that step with a reboot, and just like that, we had access to our ad information."

Capacity Scales To Fit All Enterprises
As part of an infrastructure upgrade or in the throes of an IT crises, Nexsan offers a line of mass storage products to end user companies from the mid-market to Fortune 500. The company's D2D-based backup solution, InfiniSAN, provides immediate access to data in the event that primary storage solutions are down. In contrast to tape backup solutions, the InfiniSAN eliminates the time-consuming process of linear-based data restoration. The use of hard disks as a backup solution also means that backup windows are practically a nonissue. The InfiniSAN scales in form from a desktop to a rackmount model. The product comes equipped with a standard 160 GB capacity and can scale to a capacity of several petabytes.

For the past five years, Brian Ritchie, supervisor of publishing systems at The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), has made it his mission to convert archived issues of the daily newspaper to PDF files. In that time, Ritchie has transformed a little more than the last five years' worth of papers to PDFs. "We've converted every page of every issue - from the front page to the comics. Of course, these files are pretty large and eat up space," comments Ritchie. "Also, the large file size makes it time-consuming to download the PDFs or transmit them."

If file size were no obstacle, Ritchie says the PDFs he has created would be much more useful. For example, The Plain Dealer could be distributed electronically around the world as a fee-based service. Or, the sports page could be sent via PDF to rabid Cleveland fans wherever they are located. At this point, however, this remains speculation as Ritchie continues to search for a solution to his PDF woes.

Well, for Ritchie, help may be on the way. LizardTech (Seattle) is a company that specializes in the management and distribution of digital files. The company's technology allows users to compress files at up to a 1,500 to 1 ratio. For instance, a full-color corporate report at 2.5 GB in TIFF format can be reduced to just under 3 MB in LizardTech's DjVu format. This 99% reduction in file size saves valuable storage space and also makes distribution much easier.

LizardTech offers software that allows users to convert PDF and Postscript files directly to DjVu format. The company also provides a free viewer (much like Adobe Acrobat) that is available for download (www.lizardtech.com). DjVu has been used by the Library of Congress since 1997, and it is currently on more than 15 million desktops worldwide and integrated into over 200 applications.

Download PDF

After more than 20 hours of no sleep and lots of coffee, Brian Ritchie, supervisor of publishing systems at the The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), wanted to be sure he clearly understood the directions coming from his vendor's technical support hotline. "I'm supposed to yank the hard drives from my failed tower, put them in the tower that is still functioning, and then reboot the system," he said, repeating the instructions that had just been supplied by the tech at the other end of the line. "That's right," assured the tech support confidently. Now on his knees, Ritchie began to carry out the advice of the support desk. One by one, he removed the hard drives that contained current and archived advertisements that run in the daily newspaper. Slipping the hard drives into the still functioning tower, Ritchie was well aware of his predicament - without access to ad materials, the newspaper would be incomplete as it headed to press. With the hard drives secure in their new home, the moment of truth arrived as Ritchie rebooted the system. After a few promising seconds, the second tower crashed - and, the deadline loomed even greater. When it comes to hype, mass storage solutions garner much less attention than the buzzword-laden applications they support. Talk to Ritchie about the importance of his company's storage systems; however, and it's clear he considers them to be much more than a supporting technology. He knows data is the lifeblood of his organization and understands the importance of the hardware and software that houses this data and makes it available to end users. If you haven't quite embraced this concept, then think about the business impact of not having access to your company's most critical data. For The Plain Dealer, that means 800,000 daily readers won't get a complete
newspaper. For other organizations, it might mean losing orders, annoying customers, or turning off partners. In short, when mass storage solutions go down, revenue follows suit. Data Center Systems Drive Publishing Company By the time The Plain Dealer opened its new corporate headquarters in February 2001, planning for the company's publishing data center had been underway for quite some time. The center, protected by several security systems, brings editorial, advertisement, and pagination storage and applications within four walls on the third floor of the company's shiny headquarters. The editorial information is the current and archived articles that will appear or have already run in the pages of The Plain Dealer. The graphic-intensive advertisement data is used to compose and place the ads that run in the paper and generate revenue for the company. The Web-based output system allows the newspaper, once composed, to be transmitted to the company's Tiedeman Production and Distribution Center in Brooklyn, Ohio. The importance of the data in the center is immediately clear. "If any one of these systems fails, getting the paper out becomes much more difficult," states Ritchie succinctly. "That's what we were facing when our second tower (which contained the advertisement data) crashed. We were facing a situation where not all ads would appear in the paper, and that can't ever happen." To keep the editorial flowing from writers to readers, the data center uses a rack of servers and storage solutions from Sun Microsystems. This includes multiple servers that drive DLTtape systems that back up the Sun Fibre Channel RAID (redundant array of independent disks) arrays that house 30 drives (4 GB per drive) in each tower. The RAID and tape backup systems are both designed to promote maximum uptime and redundancy. The same can be said for the Web-based output solution that automatically tracks every newspaper page as it works its way through the production process. "As the pages are completed throughout the day, we send them electronically to our printing and distribution facility just outside of Cleveland. Our new Web-based system lets us track every page of the paper and know exactly where it is in the production process at all times," explains Ritchie. "This wasn't always the case. With our old system, there was some blind faith involved." Mainframe Out, Client/Server In The newspaper's new corporate headquarters was built adjacent to the company's existing facility. And, as employees settled into their new digs, a wrecking ball razed their old office space. Along with the building upgrade came an upgrade to The Plain Dealer's existing classified system, which was driven by a DEC 11/70 mainframe. However, not even a three-column classified ad could help find the old mainframe a new home. "We tried to give the old mainframe away, but there weren't any takers. It was just too old and too big for anyone to go through the trouble of taking it out of our old office," says Ritchie. "I came to work as crews were demolishing our old building, and the mainframe was just sitting on a ledge. When I came out for lunch, it was buried in the rubble." With the new headquarters came a "new" mainframe system - a DEC 11/84 mainframe that already had some tough miles on it. Like its predecessor, this mainframe, too, was not long for this world. Concerns over ongoing maintenance costs and increasingly outdated technology led The Plain Dealer to invest in a new system to handle classified ad sales and content. "The DEC 11/84 needed to be housed in a separate room, removed from the data center. It also required us to direct connect each user to the system. It was a cabling nightmare," states Ritchie. The new system runs on the company's network. And, the storage components (Compaq StorageWorks devices with a capacity of 400 GB) can be neatly tucked away in the publishing data center. Access Online Backup Data In Seconds Walking through the company's publishing data center, Ritchie is still in a bit of disbelief when he recalls rebooting the advertisement storage system only to watch it crash seconds later. "We were pretty much at wit's end. The tech on the other line had no more advice for us, and we were pretty fed up with him anyway," recalls Ritchie. As the printing deadline loomed, Ritchie contacted a local VAR in a last-ditch effort to get his system up and running. The VAR hustled to The Plain Dealer and introduced the IT staff to InfiniSAN, a disk array from Nexsan (Los Angeles). Once in the data center, the VAR's plan involved restoring the backup tape to the hard drives in the InfiniSAN array. Ritchie, who was both skeptical and desperate, OK'd the decision. After a couple of minutes loading data into the rack, the crew connected the system to the network and rebooted it. Within seconds, the monitors sprang to life, listing the advertisement files for a disbelieving IT staff. "We were thrilled, but that lasted about a minute," remembers Ritchie. "Then, we set about getting the ad data to our production people so the paper could get out on time." The following days were much calmer as the postmortem took place. The newspaper's failed storage towers were repaired in short order, and the Nexsan product remained in place to back up the primary storage devices and provide online access to this backup data. As an added precautionary step, The Plain Dealer purchased an extended support plan from Nexsan. In addition to 24/7 phone support, Nexsan provided the paper with a spare rackmount unit with a hard drive. "If a hard drive fails, we already have a spare that is ready to load. If the Nexsan system goes down, we have an identical backup system just waiting to be brought online," explains Ritchie. In a quick demonstration, Ritchie swaps hard drives from the existing Nexsan product to the backup unit. Within minutes, the backup rackmount hums to life and the files appear on the monitor below it. Many things have changed at The Plain Dealer in the past 12 months. The newspaper has upgraded its corporate headquarters as well as many of the IT applications and storage systems that drive the company. While coffee still remains the daily drink of choice for Ritchie, it can now be enjoyed leisurely - and not as liquid jolt to get him through another system-crashing nightmare.
D2D Technology Solves The Problems Of Tape Only a handful of Nexsan's (Los Angeles) many customers come to the company via the same route as The Plain Dealer newspaper - in the heat of an emergency. When the paper realized that its current storage system was not allowing access to advertisement data (specs and graphics), a grim realization hung in the air. Without this data, Cleveland's largest newspaper would have to run an incomplete edition of its paper. In short, this was a genuine crisis for The Plain Dealer. On the advice of a local integration partner, the IT staff of The Plain Dealer implemented a product from Nexsan in an effort to quickly resolve the dilemma. After a quick implementation, the newspaper company was back up and running. The quick turnaround of fortune was due in large part to Nexsan's D2D (disk-to-disk) technology. "After two of our current RAID (redundant array of independent disks) units went down, we had little time or patience left. Our local integrator had a Nexsan RAID rack, so we got together and evaluated what options we had," recalls Brian Ritchie, supervisor of publishing systems at The Plain Dealer. "The concensus of our group was to restore the data backed up on tape to the hard drives in the Nexsan array. We followed that step with a reboot, and just like that, we had access to our ad information." Capacity Scales To Fit All Enterprises As part of an infrastructure upgrade or in the throes of an IT crises, Nexsan offers a line of mass storage products to end user companies from the mid-market to Fortune 500. The company's D2D-based backup solution, InfiniSAN, provides immediate access to data in the event that primary storage solutions are down. In contrast to tape backup solutions, the InfiniSAN eliminates the time-consuming process of linear-based data restoration. The use of hard disks as a backup solution also means that backup windows are practically a nonissue. The InfiniSAN scales in form from a desktop to a rackmount model. The product comes equipped with a standard 160 GB capacity and can scale to a capacity of several petabytes.
Crunch PDF File Sizes For the past five years, Brian Ritchie, supervisor of publishing systems at The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), has made it his mission to convert archived issues of the daily newspaper to PDF files. In that time, Ritchie has transformed a little more than the last five years' worth of papers to PDFs. "We've converted every page of every issue - from the front page to the comics. Of course, these files are pretty large and eat up space," comments Ritchie. "Also, the large file size makes it time-consuming to download the PDFs or transmit them." If file size were no obstacle, Ritchie says the PDFs he has created would be much more useful. For example, The Plain Dealer could be distributed electronically around the world as a fee-based service. Or, the sports page could be sent via PDF to rabid Cleveland fans wherever they are located. At this point, however, this remains speculation as Ritchie continues to search for a solution to his PDF woes. Well, for Ritchie, help may be on the way. LizardTech (Seattle) is a company that specializes in the management and distribution of digital files. The company's technology allows users to compress files at up to a 1,500 to 1 ratio. For instance, a full-color corporate report at 2.5 GB in TIFF format can be reduced to just under 3 MB in LizardTech's DjVu format. This 99% reduction in file size saves valuable storage space and also makes distribution much easier. LizardTech offers software that allows users to convert PDF and Postscript files directly to DjVu format. The company also provides a free viewer (much like Adobe Acrobat) that is available for download (www.lizardtech.com). DjVu has been used by the Library of Congress since 1997, and it is currently on more than 15 million desktops worldwide and integrated into over 200 applications. Download PDF