Turbomachinery Company Consolidates Servers with JetStor

As a leading manufacturer of advanced turbomachinery, the Elliott Company helps to power the world. Its products, such as centrifugal and axial compressors, steam turbines, and power recovery expanders, are used to produce, transport, and refine oil and natural gas. They also convert feedstock into polymers, resins, films, fibers, and chemicals, generate electricity, and drive compressors, pumps, blowers, fans, and other industrial machinery.‍

Elliott built a robust infrastructure to house administrative and engineering data for many of its 1,900 employees at 32 facilities across the globe. Four JetStor 516iS arrays rapidly store data at the firm’s data center. This information is backed up to three JetStor 516iS arrays and a JetStor SAS 516J device at a DR site. “To maintain daily operations and meet regulatory compliance, our business data must always be stored, backed up, and available,” said Richard B., technology manager for Elliott. “JetStor 516iS arrays deliver the high-speed storage performance to support a global enterprise like ours.”The JetStor solutions anchor Elliott’s strategy for streamlining its IT operations. The firm now runs most of its key business applications on four servers with multiple virtual machines, which forward data to the JetStor arrays for safekeeping. As a result, Elliott retired its older servers and slashed complexity as well as power and cooling costs. Elliott further economized by eliminating the need for Fibre Channel switches and HBAs, and cabling thanks to the support of the JetStor solutions for iSCSI connectivity.Moreover, Elliott administrators can easily add additional drives to the 16 bays of each JetStor enclosure without taking the device offline, or attach four JetStor SAS 516J systems to each chassis to add up to 80 drives to the infrastructure. “Thanks to JetStor, we can incrementally expand our storage capacity quickly, easily, and very cost-effectively,” said Richard.The IT staff relies on the web-based management interface of the JetStor devices to monitor the status and performance of each array. “JetStor solutions are rock-solid, but I have additional peace of mind knowing they will automatically send me an email if a problem ever arises,” added Richard.

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Tasked with delivering business-critical applications and storing their data more efficiently and reliably, Elliott’s IT staff consolidated its aging servers onto a handful of devices running over 75 virtual machines. It then linked each VMware server to a pair of switches with dual gigabit iSCSI connections. The switches, in turn, link to four JetStor 516iS arrays, also via dual gigabit iSCSI connections.Administrators used the JetStor management system to deploy a RAID 10 (or 1+0) configuration. This strategy both mirrors and stripes data on each array’s disks for the highest level of availability and input/output performance. The IT team created a logical drive out of the physical disks and used VMware’s iSCSI initiator to designate it as the target for the iSCSI links. RAID 10 coupled with the redundant links between the arrays, switches, and servers ensures that data is always safe and flowing. Moreover, RAID 10 provides unsurpassed data protection by tolerating multiple simultaneous drive failures without downtime or data loss.“Our infrastructure doesn’t have a single point of failure, which prevents any disruptions to our business processes” explained Richard. “In addition, connecting our JetStor arrays with conventional gigabit NICs gave us excellent capacity at minimum cost while eliminating the headache and learning curve of installing Fibre Channel hardware and cabling.”Elliott deployed a similar architecture at its DR site, except it connected the JetStor SAS 516J as a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) to a JetStor 516iS for further cost-savings. The firm replicates data to the DR site via gigabit Ethernet switches after local backups are completed. “With our JetStor solutions, we can add a vast amount of JBOD storage to our system,” said Richard. “This offers a terrific storage value for any enterprise without compromising performance or dependability.”

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JETSTOR

JetStor meets the evolving needs for data storage, protection, and management. We leverage leading technologies to offer high-value solutions for NAS, SANs, clouds, and hyper-converged infrastructures (HCIs).  Since 1994, our customers have spanned virtually every industry, and range from Fortune 500 enterprises to small and medium-sized firms.  We support environments from data centers and clouds to branch offices and remote sites.

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