Chariton Valley Telephone Corporation
StoreVault wires in Chariton Valley’s data storage issues
Customer Overview
The Chariton Valley Telephone Corporation (Chariton Valley) is a local-exchange company that provides state-of-the-art telecommunications services – such as telephone, wireless, internet and cable TV, to businesses and residents of Northeast Missouri. Chariton Valley is a leading provider in Missouri and the neighboring states, offering fiber optic networks to subscribers. With over 50 years of experience, Chariton Valley’s goal is to keep its customers in touch, logged in, entertained and communicating, without barriers, at an affordable rate.
Customer Challenges
Currently, Chariton Valley has 90 employees and 45 servers, which manage 2TB of data. The original setup included a number of HP servers with internal storage, housing file shares. Additionally, Adaptec Snap Servers stored some “IT only” files.
Users saved files to various windows “shares” scattered throughout the network. Long distance call logging and local call records resulted in increasingly large amounts of data ( millions of minutes a month ) written to these “shares”, often stretching them to capacity. Sometimes, file shares also utilized SQL Server drive space, where the OSS (the suite offers the framework to automate provisioning processes in network assignment and activation) stored data. In addition, FCC required retaining customer data for seven years. No permanent archiving solution was available to clean up some of these data. Discontinued operation of archiving to CDs created even more data for disks.
Managing scattered file shares lacked a centralized strategy. Users filled up hard drives quickly and keeping servers functional became a nuisance. HP or white-box servers with file shares containing accounting and call record data failed at least twice a year – shutting them down completely.
Veritas Backup Exec with a HP SSL1016 16-tape autoloader handled all tape backups, while the Buffalo Terastation stored disk-to-disk backups using Veritas Backup Exec. The issue was speed of backups and network traffic. Chariton Valley’s backup data blocked the network. Moreover, back up to tape was slow, requiring more than 24 hours. This often led to severe network congestion.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Jim Simon, General Manager, Jesse Estevez an IT manager and Darin Oswalt, Network Analyst formed a team to make the call on building a robust storage infrastructure. Realizing that the current Windows-based file shares, Buffalo Terastation and Adaptec snap servers could not provide the performance and ease of enterprise class servers, they searched for more viable solutions. When Chariton Valley’s partner and VAR Uptime LTD referred Walsworth Publishing as a local contact who used StoreVault storage, the team spent a morning at Walsworth’s facility to become acquainted with the StoreVault product. Strong recommendations from Walsworth Publishing were instrumental in Chariton Valley’s decision
for StoreVault.
Chariton Valley now runs two StoreVault units– each with 12,500GB drives and dual-parity with a net capacity of 3346GB. The company also bought licenses for CIFS, SnapRestore and iSCSI. One StoreVault has now centralized “file shares” using CIFS while iSCSI LUNs house the SQL Database. The second StoreVault is used for replication between the two units for disaster recovery. Snapshots take place hourly, daily and weekly for all data residing in StoreVault. The CIFS shares are now easily available for upper level management to restore from their own Snapshots, if necessary. A NexSan SataBoy array helps in staging StoreVault data to disk for tape backups mainly used for archiving. For the future, the team plans to transfer all the data from Buffalo Terastation and Adaptec Snap server to StoreVault.
Customer Experience
Darin says, “This was one of our first investments into storage, and what we found was that StoreVault was committed to seeing their product succeed on a customer by customer basis. Their level of involvement, including personal response from GM, a dedicated resource and couple of days training, in resolving some of the issues we faced during turn up was stellar. Things didn’t go 100% according to plan, but they made it very clear we were not in this alone – and that feels great.” Darin adds happily - “Since we’ve put the SV into production, we have not had a single instance of storage related downtime.”
Customer Benefits
Chariton Valley has obtained peace of mind by protecting their data using StoreVault. Snapshots have resulted in fast backups and replication provides offsite protection that no longer interferes with their daily operation. Storage space utilization is efficient with centralization and StoreVault’s FlexVol technology.
Previously, windows server failures and downtime problems ranged from 4-5 hours up to 2 days. With Chariton Valley’s two StoreVault, these worries have finally been mitigated.
Chariton Valley is connected and providing service to its customers constantly with StoreVault.
