FES Systems, Inc.
StoreVault S500 and VMware improve FES Systems' server and storage management
Introduction
FES Systems, Inc. was formed in 1949 to design, build, and install automatic freezing systems for the ice cream and frozen food industries. Today, FES products are found in the food and beverage, chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, industrial and liquefied gas, and petroleum refining industries, as well as many related industries. FES products include screw compressor packages, plate and frame heat exchangers, microprocessor controls and computer supervisory systems. It also provides heat exchangers, centrifugal compressor packages, engineered systems, and post sales services and support.
Customer Challenges
FES Systems has 300 employees accessing 10 individual application servers. These servers used to use direct-attached storage, resulting in constant disk space demands on some servers while others were hardly used. In addition to experiencing a capacity see-saw, FES found that making plans for CAD applications and managing disks was a pain because usage rates were unforeseeable. Adding more space never resolved its ever-growing needs, and simply compounded the management headache by creating more need for network drive mappings and shortcuts. Disruptions in operations resulted in some very dissatisfied end users, who subsequently gave the IT staff the "cold shoulder."
Solution
Gary Hensel, IT Director at FES Systems, faced ongoing capacity shortages and chronically poor usage of the storage that he owned. He wished he could reduce the number of servers, provide large amounts of sharable disk space, and add new space without affecting his users' drive mappings. On top of all of this, he needed to replace his exchange server. When Atec Group, a York, Pennsylvania StoreVault VAR, suggested a StoreVault S500, he was so pleased that he put previous purchasing plans on hold just to investigate further. "We had almost made up our mind to buy another product," he said, "when Atec suggested the new StoreVault Division from NetApp. The StoreVault offered richer features at a lower cost and with good support".
Atec Group, a new StoreVault reseller, saw an opportunity for VMware. The StoreVault S500 would function as the baseline storage infrastructure supporting multiple virtual servers on an HP blade. These virtual machines would connect to individual LUNs on the StoreVault using iSCSI, and file serving needs would be provided natively by NAS shares.
Now at FES, an HP blade hosts four VMware virtual machines and each one has its own storage on the StoreVault S500. Its servers no longer consume only part of their storage capacity and processing power; instead, the HP blade is sized properly and each server has a dedicated storage resource. VMware gave Gary the flexibility to manage each virtual machine's disk space requirements and consolidated his various file servers into one single, scalable solution. The new infrastructure is protected with RAID-DP and snapshots. FES Systems met its storage needs faster and far more flexibly than before with a system that requires less power, cooling, and rack space.
Gary's future plans include the purchase of another HP server to use as a second VMware platform, upping his total virtual machine count to 10. He'll be able to provision and size the storage for these new machines on the fly, without interrupting his end users or current systems. Windows file serving needs will continue to be met by the CIFS license he purchased for the StoreVault S500, with no need for the tired old file servers and their bottlenecks. And with the support and service he has received from Atec, he's feeling even cooler than ever - just the way Freezing Equipment Systems likes it.
Customer Experience
The StoreVault S500 used by FES is fast, smooth, and most importantly invisible to end users. Additional virtual servers can easily be planned for and added into the existing solution. Atec Group's experts set up and configured the StoreVault and VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3.0, made the entire virtual machine integration process effortless. VMware over iSCSI was more economical than a Fibre Channel solution and Gary's confidence in the reliability of the system is extremely high. Atec Group's thoughtful advice lowered his cost of operations while improving system availability overall. The added benefit of having Windows file sharing through CIFS made it even smarter. Despite some initial challenges configuring this system (the original IT manger left his position during the job and this was also the first time that Atec had used a StoreVault S500), Atec's commitment to FES, its perseverance, and its professionalism has paid off handsomely.
Customer Benefits
The ability to add space on the fly without disrupting users, as well as allocate storage to different servers from a shared storage pool gave FES the flexibility it needed. Planning for servers in advance and deploying them onto the existing infrastructure helps them keep costs low and provision servers efficiently. The multifunctional capability of the StoreVault S500 to work with both NAS and a SAN allowed FES Systems to re-evaluate their EqualLogic SAN considerations and reduce complexity even further.
| Technical Environment | |
| Operating Systems | WindowsNT/2000/XP, OS/400 |
| Current Virtualized Server Applications: | Microsoft Exchange, DNS, file and print serving |
| Future applications: | Web servers, AutoCAD, MathCAD, refrigerant calculation software |
About Atec Group
Atec is the Northeast's leading business information architecture firm. For over 20 years, organizations have relied on Atec Group's knowledge and expertise in consulting, design, procurement, implementation, and ongoing support to deploy optimal solutions with leading technologies. Atec Group is one of StoreVault's Premier Partners and a NetApp Platinum authorized reseller. Atec Group is also a leading VMware VIP Reseller with a strong focus on the integration of VMware into shared storage environments.
