Ahearn, Jasco & Co, P.A.
Accounting firm modernizes its server and storage environment while staying within its budget
Customer Overview
For 25 years, Ahearn, Jasco + Company, P.A. has been providing exemplary accounting and financial services to individual, business, and government clients. Services range from personal and business consulting and management to tax and audit services to personal financial and estate planning. The firm is a professional corporation licensed with the Florida Board of Accountancy. On-site and traveling services are also provided for short-term projects and events.
The Challenge
The computing environment at Ahearn Jasco + Co. had 6 servers serving 35 users. The servers were legacy systems using Direct Attached Storage with disks attached to each of the servers.
Some of these “servers” were older single-disk desktop systems. Performance was painfully slow in some cases and in others the lack of RAID meant that data protection was a major concerns. Storage had been gradually added to individual systems in chunks; as a result, some servers were filled efficiently, but others were sadly underutilized. In addition to these inefficiencies, there was a larger problem on the horizon—the challenge of meeting the thirst for increasing amounts of storage as the company experienced rapid growth. Tax season was fast approaching, and more DAS was not a viable option. Not only was the price performance ratio low and expenses high, but the resulting system downtime and disruptions caused major pain for users.
The system administrator was also unhappy because it was hard to get his arms around the sprawl and take a high-level, unified view of the entire storage scenario. Symantec Backup Exec pushed data to tape, slowly, and did not offer rapid recovery. The company had neither an acceptable disaster recovery solution, nor a way scale the backup process. The approach of hurricane season underscored the importance of quick recovery times.
The Solution
Dave DePillis, the MCSE-, CCNA-, and VCP-certified professional IT manager at Ahearn Jasco + Co., could clearly see that he needed to upgrade his entire aged IT infrastructure. However, he knew that replacing and rebuilding the existing server and storage environment was going to be expensive and possibly result in the same issues he currently faced. Naturally, he had a limited budget, and he desperately needed to stretch his dollars as far as they could go. In short, he needed to find smart alternatives to the traditional way of handling storage.
He spoke with peers and researched the latest technologies, coming across both iSCSI SANs and server virtualization. Dave saw that these technologies could reduce the cost of restructuring his storage and server environment while improving his ability to manage capacity and future investment.
Dave was considering products like the Dell/EMC AX150 when his reseller, Altek Computer Group of Miami, Florida, recommended a product from StoreVault, a NetApp division. Dave tried out a StoreVault S500 and quickly concluded that the other solutions on the market were priced higher, were not as easy to install or manage, and did not have the same broad set of useful features.
The reasons for choosing the StoreVault S500 were compelling. The S500 had both file services and offered iSCSI SAN, solving scalability and capacity problems. It was certified and worked seamlessly with VMware, the leading virtualization application. The sturdy software features meant a much higher degree of reliability for his data. On top of this, its sticker price was definitely within his budget. He realized that this single box could be the backbone of his new storage environment and address the many challenges he had identified.
With his S500, he is able to allocate storage on the fly quickly. He uses esxRanger to create “hot” backups of his virtual machines, which he then stores in a CIFS share on a NAS volume and snapshots daily. This setup provides multiple copies of his complete server environment in a compressed format and allows for reliable recovery in case of a disaster. A second CIFS share is used for Windows file serving needs, eliminating the need for another file server. Backup Exec continues to function as his tape software, but it is no longer limited to the tape drive speed to finish backup jobs.
In the future, Dave is considering replicating his entire StoreVault unit to a separate location for offsite protection of both NAS and SAN data.
Customer Experience
Dave says “My StoreVault with VMware is extremely powerful. It is cost effective and blows away anything I have seen before. I don’t expect to invest again for the next five years.”
Dave appreciates that the solution is easy to install and work with. It took him just a few hours to get it all up and running. Backing up a 100GB virtual machine is very efficient, producing only a 17GB file; incremental backups only take a few hundred megabytes. Furthermore, any virtual machine can be restored back from any one of the past 255 days in less than an hour.
Customer Benefits
Ahearn Jasco + Co. now adds new application servers without thinking about physical server procurement processes, rack space, cooling, power consumption, or cost. The consolidation of six servers into one has eased Dave’s management burden and with virtualization he no longer needs to bring in new hardware just to add applications. As new applications are added, he can rapidly provision a virtual server.
The reliability and rapid disaster recovery capabilities of the storage at Ahern Jasco + Co. have been much improved by the StoreVault Advanced Protection Architecture, including RAID-DP. Backups are a breeze: they’re instant and efficient, and they require significantly less disk space than before. This network storage infrastructure is expected to last for the next three to five years and brings with it the exciting prospect of future scalability at near zero cost. All the benefits of a modern storage and server architecture are available to the company for an investment that beat their budget targets.
Now the accountants at Ahearn Jasco + Co. can spend their time counting the dollars left in Dave’s budget rather than the number of minutes spent waiting on their computers!
| Technical Environment | |
| Operating Systems | Windows 2003 server, Windows 2000 server, Windows XP |
| Critical Software Deployed | Domain controller, file services, Citrix for 35 accounting applications, Exchange Server 2000 |
| Backup Software | esxRanger, Symantec Backup Exec |
