Welcome to StorageTek's 

Corporate Computing Center

The Corporate Computing Center on the third floor in Building 4 of the Louisville plant is StorageTek’s primary production data center. In many ways, StorageTek Information Systems (IS) is a typical StorageTek customer site and experiences many of the same challenges as its customers. IS operates a mixed environment with the mainframe MVS environment running legacy applications under OS/390 and three open system platforms: SUN servers running Solaris used for development applications; Compaq servers running NT/WIN2000 used for email and desktop applications; and HP servers running UX used for SAP applications. 

Below are some of the StorageTek products/solutions showcased in the IS Data Center.  Through the EPE (External Product Evaluation formerly known as Beta) process, IS tests the latest StorageTek products before they go into our customer evaluation sites.  This allows visitors an early look at the most current StorageTek products and solutions in a “live” environment where actual customer-to-customer experiences can be shared. 

In addition, IS has been on the leading edge of integrating products together to solve actual business problems.  For example, with the growth of the open systems environment, a recent challenge for IS was to design and implement a world-class backup and restore solution that met the requirements for reliability, performance and expense. With 400+ clients and three different platforms, connectivity, administration and complexity were of great concern. For this backup solution, IS chose many of StorageTek’s latest products and solutions, including:

• SN6000, the backbone of the Enterprise Backup Storage Area Network (SAN): 
  The SN6000 allows IS to share tape devices in the open systems environment between heterogeneous servers.  IS reduced the number of real tape drives required for backup and restore from 150 to 31.

• T9840A tape drives used in the Enterprise Backup SAN (Fibre Channel) as well as in the mainframe environment (ESCON): 
  This product provides IS the ability to significantly shorten the back-up window with its high performance (10 MB/sec) and 20 GB cartridge. These drives are attached to 9310 LSMs.

• T9940A tape drives used in the Enterprise Backup SAN (Fibre Channel):
  The T9940A drive was added to the SN6000 SAN not only because of its performance and reliability but also because of its high capacity. Its 60 GB (uncompressed) cartridge capacity allows IS to manage its backup requirements with fewer cartridges. It allows IS to reduce the number of cartridges required for backup, which saves space in the LSMs, requiring fewer LSMs and less floor space.  This high capacity cartridge also reduces cost for off-site vaulting.  

• 9176 Intelligent Storage Solution open systems disk: 
  The 9176 is attached to all the major file servers in the SUN, HP and NT environments. The mirroring feature of the device is used to create a synchronized copy of the NetBackup master database.  In a small footprint, the 9176 provides up to 14.4 TB of high availability disk.

Other StorageTek solutions employed by IS:

• V960 SVA:
  With the faster performance of this virtual disk product, IS chose to take advantage of its high reliability in the demanding HP-SAP environment.  Its performance has proven exceptional, and the added capability of SnapShot for database back-ups provided a solution for IS that was solid. In addition, IS is moving toward implementation of hardware mirroring through PPRC for its business continuity solution for the HP-SAP environment.

• ASM with T9840B High Performance Tape Drives:
  StorageTek evaluated two HSM solutions, StorageTek's ASM and  Veritas Storage Migrator.  Both solutions have been well-received in the marketplace with many production shops using one or the other product for different reasons.  StorageTek IS was looking for HSM fileserver automation.  Due to the inherent complexity of fileservers, ASM was chosen as the HSM solution.  ASM represents a single solution that can be left to itself for long periods of time without upgrade and with very little maintenance.   If deployed properly, ASM can be used to replace large fileservers with terabytes of disk with smaller servers with fewer disks.  ASM moves idle data from expensive disk to tape, allowing the corporation to save money on maintenance and disk expansion, and freeing users from file maintenance.  Coupled with the high performance T9840B with its 20 MB/second uncompressed tape speed, this ASM solution is satisfying our internal customer needs.

• VSM:  
  This product provides a virtual image of tape drives and tape media in the mainframe environment. It enhances performance, providing disk speed for tape datasets. It increases cartridge utilization by stacking datasets on tape, saving LSM cartridge slots and floor space. VSM provides more virtual drives (not physical) for peak workloads, saving dollars.  Real tape drives are transparent to the host so that implementation of new tape drive technology is fast and painless.

• L700 Library:  
  This 700 cartridge capacity LSM is driven by ACSLS.  With T9840A and T9940A tape drives attached, it provides a backup solution for the IS NT environment.

If you are interested in bringing a customer group to the Corporate Computing Center, please work with Customer Visits at 303.673.4167.  Customer Visits works with us to tailor a tour around what the customer's interests and concerns are, within the schedule of the customer's visit. We can provide a high-level overview of the StorageTek products and solutions that we use in our day-to-day operations, or we can provide a more detailed visit regarding a specific solution. If there is interest, we can engage our system architects to discuss details with them, customer to customer.  

Internal StorageTek work groups who would like to schedule a tour to see how StorageTek runs its IT business should contact Deb Saret at 303.673.3109.