Utilitek Systems
Utilitek Simplifies and Improves File Serving for Linux and Windows
Customer Overview
Utilitek Systems, Inc. designs and builds both printed circuit boards and computer-aided engineering software. Using its comprehensive knowledge of Mentor Graphics software and systems, Utilitek also offer consulting services that deliver outstanding products, designs, and services to its customers. If something can be built with Mentor Graphics tools and systems, Utilitek can show you how.
Customer Challenges
Utilitek’s storage environment had been built on two custom-built Linux machines, each with a single Intel 2GHz P4 processor, which served files to seven users. These Linux servers had standard IDE hard drives configured as RAID 1. Applications ran on PCs with the data stored on the file servers. The primary Linux server performed scheduled backups and mirrored the data to a duplicate Linux server. The IT team also made nightly backups to an external SCSI SDLT tape device with SDLT 220 tape cartridges. They sent each of these tapes off site once the backup was completed, for disaster recovery purposes, and produced two SDLT 220 tapes every day. As business grew, Utilitek’s IT environment faced several challenges.
Utilitek was producing and maintaining an increasing number of printed circuit board designs for its customers using a Mentor Graphics database. The designs were becoming larger and more complex—growing from the initial file sizes of 200MB to about 2GB each. With customers requiring both new designs and maintenance for earlier projects, Utilitek’s storage needs had grown from 55GB to over 180GB in 4 years, which is equivalent to about 35% growth year-on-year. Utilitek expected this profitable growth pattern to persist in the coming years.
Backups were performed using Linux’s Logical Volume Manager to create snapshots, after which an Rsync tool replicated the data over to a secondary server. The team had established a snapshot volume and would freeze user disks in order to create disk snapshots. During this time, all data changes were made in RAM. When a snapshot was completed, changes from RAM were written to the disk. These homegrown snapshots took 30 minutes and sometimes didn’t complete because of other operations and loads on the server. Snapshots were not created frequently enough using the current mechanism to meet performance requirements, forcing the team to seek commercial storage solutions.
Over 10% of one of the team members’ time was spent just maintaining this home-grown solution. Both drive failures and storage upgrades
resulted in downtime of up to several hours during the day, depending on the kind of task. Downtime was synonymous with revenue loss for Utilitek, since productivity depended on accessing CAD design files.
Solution: StoreVault S500
Bryan Young, Executive VP of Utilitek, knew the company needed to change how it handled storage. He outlined a set of requirements including a much improved snapshot capability to eliminate downtime, automate maintenance, and quick scalability. Above all, he wanted to minimize the impact on his current infrastructure. He considered several major vendors and his reseller ATEC group suggested StoreVault, a NetApp Division. Bryan performed an extensive evaluation of StoreVault and was very impressed with the high system availability when using the Advanced Protection Architecture, the NetApp Snapshot capability, as well as ATEC’s capable knowledge and support during installation and configuration of the unit.
Today, Bryan runs the StoreVault S500 as a NAS file server, with six 250GB drives (including a hot spare and a RAID-DP drive). All Windows clients connect to the StoreVault using CIFS and Linux clients use NFS. The S500 creates hourly Snapshot copies instantaneously, and the copies are available for both backups and restores. This process is completely transparent to end users. The latest snapshot copy is copied to a Linux server nightly for a second layer of protection. With StoreVault’s Snapshots, users can restore files themselves, without needing a system administrator to retrieve the files from the backup tapes. Utilitek continues to create tape backups of the Linux server and send the tapes offsite for disaster recovery protection.In the near future, as his storage needs continue their growth, Bryan plans to buy either more StoreVault units for StoreVault replication, or more disk drives to expand the system he has. He knows that these additional units will offer great reliability, availability, and performance without requiring any changes to his infrastructure.
Customer Experience
According to Bryan, the product was easy to install and configure and he did not need any special training. He is delighted with the overall performance of the appliance and says: “This is better than my previous Linux file server solution and is exceeding my expectations. My requirements were for a reliable snapshot and high availability solution, but we received great performance for free!”
Customer Benefits
Utilitek has reduced downtime using StoreVault. When a potential drive failure is detected, the Rapid RAID Rebuild feature copies the drive contents in the background to the hot spare before the failure occurs. Uptime has been 100% and allows for continuous access to the CAD files—a major step forward. In addition, growing or shrinking capacity on the fly is simple and requires no downtime. Not only did Utilitek set the unit up for only $7400, it has since experienced a drop in cost of ownership as employees have not spent a single minute on regular maintenance.
Utilitek’s need for high performance, intelligent design, and reliability led it straight to a StoreVault solution, and it has found the solution even more useful than anticipated.
