Case Study

StorageDirector | Z Series Case Study

Impulse Advanced Communications

eliminates a single-point of failure to voice and data services at the renewal price of its legacy HA cluster SAN solution

Overview

Since 1996, Impulse Advanced Communications (www.impulse.net) has designed, implemented and managed advanced voice and data networks. With services that include FailSafe Internet Access, hosted VoIP, managed hosting and network design, the B2B communications provider helps businesses solve complex communication problems. However, the company’s IT department faced challenges of its own to meet data and application availability without breaking the IT bank. As an IT director, Jessie Bryan is responsible for all aspects of system and application engineering at Impulse’s Santa Barbara, Calif. data center – one of the company’s three data centers – overseeing an IBM BladeCenter server environment that includes over 250 physical and virtual servers running VMware ESXi. Specialized in business-critical services, it’s imperative that their technology infrastructure – 20 Zimbra e-mail and web server clusters supporting 10,000 mailboxes, 5,000 website and calendar services – always be accessible. solution, Impulse next tried an EMC® Celerra. Unfortunately, after deploying the EMC® solution, Bryan soon found it had its own technological short-comings. For example, the EMC® Celerra maxed out at 2 Gb/sec through put, resulting in low network bandwidth. Additionally, like the legacy solution, the EMC® Celerra would eventually become cost-prohibitive to keep pace with current and future storage needs. Evaluating his experience with the legacy technologies offered by NetApp® and EMC®, Bryan decided to explore alternative storage platforms that would be less expensive to scale-out and maintain without overspending on proprietary hardware and software. At the same time, the company didn’t want to sacrifice enterprise features, like high-availability or unlimited snapshots for...