For Kim Woods Only 6-8 part 2 - Additional requested information

C,qnrsoN ConnpANrHS Carlson Companies is.one of the largest privately held companies in the United States, with more than 180,000 employees in more than 140 countries. Carlson enter- prises include a presence in marketing, business and leisure travel, and hospitaliiy industries.

Its Information Technology (IT) division, carlson Shared Services, acts as a service provider to its internal clients and consequently must support a spectrum of user applications and services. The IT division ure. u centralized Outu pto""r.ing model to meet business operational requirements. The central computing environl ment includes an IBM mainframe and over 50 networked Hewlett-packard and Sun servers [KRAN04, CLAR02, HIGGO2]. The mainframe supports a wide range of applications, including oracle financial database, e-mail, Miciosoft Exchange,iveb, PeopleSoft, and a data warehouse application.

In2002, the IT division established six goals for assuring that IT services continued to meet the needs of a growing company with heavi reliance on data and applications:

l. Implement ari enterprise data warehouse. 2, Build a global network. 3. Move to enterprise-wide architecture, 4. Established six-sigma quality for Carlson clients 5. Facilitate outsourcing and exchange. 6. Leverage existing technology and resource.

The key to meeting these goals was to implement a storage area network (sAN) with a consolidated, centralized database to support mainframe and s9ryer applications. carlson needed a SAN and data ."rrt", approach that pro_ vided a reliable, highly scalabre facility to accommodate the inireasing demand of its users.

Until recently, the central DP shop included separate disc storage for each server, plus that of the mainframe.This dispersed data storage scheme had ttie advantage of respon- siveness; that is, the access time from a server to its data was minimal. HowJver, theiata management cost was high.There had to be backup procedures for the storage on each seryer, as well as management controls to reconcile data distributed throighout the

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system.Themainframeincludedaneffrcientdisasterrecoveryplantopleservedatai4 theeventofmajorsystemcrashesorotherincidentsandtogetdatabackonlinewithlit- tle or no di*rpil;;ih" o."rr. No comparable plan existed for the many

servers'

As carlson"ls;;;;;.;"* u"yotro ro teraoJytes (TB) of business-critical data' the

IT team determined that a comprehensive network storage strategy would be required

to manage future $owth'

TheexistingCarlsonServercomplexmadeuseofFibreChannellinkstoachieve communication and b;;Ltp *puiititi". among servers' Carlson

considered extend-

ing this capability to " tJ'f-Ufown Fibre Charinel SAN that would encompass

the

sefver, the mainfram";;;J massive centralized storage facilities.The IT team con-

cluded that further ""p""t-i."

t.itg Fitt" Channel technologies alone would be dif-

ficultandcostlytomanage.Atthesametime,insupporting.themanyoffsiteclient systems that accesseil;;;;,,1", server, the ir snop atready had

a substantial in-

vestment in Ip netwo;;;;;i- and staff training. Accordingly,.carlson sought a

solution that would l;;;;g; rhis Ip investment, irovide scalability as additional

local and remote ,"rri""r ui" added, and require minimal traffic engineering of the

storage transport network' Thus, Carlsor, ,itifJ on a solution based on a core IP SAN that would

meet

bothdata-centerandwide-areastoragerequirementsandseamlesslyintegratenew storage technologies.

The core of the carlson SAN is an IP-based scheme in which Gigabit Ethernet switches

carry IP traffic among servers and between servefs and the central storage'Attached to

the Gigabit switches are Nishan IP Storage switches,which provide a Fibre channel in-

terface for the r"*"r, unJ.t*ug" *dun IP traffrc switch into the Ethernet core

iilgr* inlj-The Ethernet switclies "lloY u considerable cost advantage over compa-

rable Fibre channel *irctr". *a requireiower-cost management and maintenance'

Forredundancy,serversaredual.homedtothelPstorageswitches,whichin turn connect to ,"ouniirrt-itrt.t"", switches. The ratio of

servers to storage inter-

connect is determine; Ot G throughput requirements of each,server group' Simi-

larly, multiple Ip storagl switches connect ih" Eth"tn"t switch core to the sAN

storage system. rrri, ""iiiffiion_1T be scaled to support additional servers and

storage arrays UV aOOing JAditionat IP storage switche; The network core of Ether-

net switches also expan"cls easily by addingadditional switches'

The focus "f

td;;;;;SnN ir a t:lts HP StorageWorks Disc arrav'A major consideration in planning the transition was the

migraiion of data from the main-

frame,s storage to tfre cen:tral storage.The mainframe hosts several mission-critical ap-

plications in a round-the-"i.* fu.ftion' Thug an offline data migration was not feasible'

The migration of all;;;r data to this array proceeded in two phases In the first

phase, each server #;;;;ffline arrd a rimite copy was performed to transfer the

Fibre Channel domain IP/IFCP domain

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Fibre Channel domain

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Mainframe

Figure IV.1 Carlson's Data Center SAN

application data on the server systems to the new storage system. The second phase involved the transfer of 1.2 TB of data from the mainframe's legacy storage to the new storage system. Carlson contracted this task out to HP storage eXperts who made use of proprietary data migration and network management tools to enable the transfer to occur during production processing hours. End users were unaffected during the migration.

Carlson's IP SAN helps reduce the ongoing administration and management of storage networking by taking advantage of well-established and well-understood IP networking technologies. In addition, putting storage data over IP facilitates inte- gration of more efficient storage services for Carlson's enterprise-wide network, in- cluding cenftalized backup of remote sites to the data center SAN.

Discussion Questions I. Discuss how the Carlson SAN approach addresses the IT goals the company is

trying to achieve.

2. Discuss the pros and cons of consolidating data on a SAN central data facility versus the dispersed arrangement it replaces

3. The Carlson SAN mixes equipment from a number of vendors.What problems does this raise and what are some management options for dealing with them?