Case Study

Case Study 3: Carlson Companies

By:

_______________

CIS 505

Professor: _________________

_____________ University

May 23, 2013

Assess how the Carlson SAN approach would be implemented in today’s environment.

Like many IT staff faced with exponential storage growth, Norman Owens realized a few years back that his company was headed for a challenge if it did not start consolidating its storage resources onto a storage area network (SAN). Owens, a storage network engineer and consultant with Carlson Companies, spoke to an audience of his peers at Storage Decisions 2003 recently about his company's consolidation efforts. (While not necessarily a household name, Carlson Companies is an international presence behind such well-known retail and hotel chains as TGI Friday's and Radisson hotels and resorts. Before consolidating onto a SAN, Owens' shared services group supported a configuration with one mainframe and 26 servers, where most of the servers were hard at work supporting the company's Oracle Financials database under HP/UX. This arrangement handled 14TB of data, over 54 SCSI and 8 ESCON connections. "It looked like a point-to-point SCSI solution," Owens said, noting, "There were a whole lot of cables." When they needed more storage, "We'd just go buy another frame. After the company asked his group to take on more responsibilities for its global IT storage operations, Owens and his coworkers decided now was the time to look at a more consolidated approach. Enter the company's current storage over IP "fan-out" infrastructure, with Nishan Systems' switches and a core/edge design that Owens affectionately calls "the funnel." Commenting on their decision to move into IP-based solutions, Owens said that the ability to connect remote sites was something "we had to do, or else our storage wouldn't have been approved." The company rolled out its extensive SAN consolidation in phases. Today, it consists of 108 Fiber Channel connections, 8 ESCON connections, 56...