McAfee's Technical Marketing (TME) Lab Deploys Infortrend's ESVA Solution for Simplified Storage Management in a Virtual Environment

McAfee's Technical Marketing (TME) Lab Deploys Infortrend's ESVA Solution for Simplified Storage Management in a Virtual Environment

With a complicated storage infrastructure that needed to be managed from all of its various points, McAfee’s TME Lab was looking to simplify life for its IT managers – while optimizing ROI and maximizing application productivity. McAfee’s TME Lab turned to Infortrend reseller aXcelerate Networks for recommendations on how to best revamp their storage infrastructure. aXcelerate Networks recommended Infortrend’s ESVA as a better storage solution for McAfee’s TME Lab, and one that would bring scalability and improved price/performance to the storage infrastructure.

The Challenges: Achieving Single Point of Management for Multiple Storage Solutions

McAfee’s TME Lab storage environment consisted of multiple storage systems, and had no single point of administration. The company had been using Direct Attached Storage (DAS), and was looking to convert these into Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions. Because the very nature of a DAS environment makes system administration more challenging and labor intensive, McAfee’s TME Lab had dedicated a part-time administrator to oversee all of the machines in the lab. By implementing a SAN solution, McAfee’s TME Lab will be able to leverage high speed, high capacity drive economics across multiple servers, saving resources and maximizing ROI.

The Solution and Its Benefits: ESVA E20 Offers High Performance and Reliability While Reducing Energy Consumption, Providing Drive Space for Virtual Machines

Infortrend’s ESVA (Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture) was installed in McAfee’s TME Lab to provide drive space for virtual machines. Multiple guest operating systems are running concurrently on a single storage pool that was formatted into VMware’s datastore (VMFS).

ESVA simplifies configuration and management and features high reliability and performance - enabling the reduction of valuable administration resources. Under the new SAN infrastructure, there are 8 VMware ESX Servers connected to the ESVA. With this virtualization function; McAfee’s TME Lab can now manage all virtual machines through a single point. ESVA’s storage virtualization operates at the block level, offloading work from the host and protecting against interruption, downtime and host performance degradation.

Combined with a virtualized SAN infrastructure, Infortrend’s ESVA E20 provides:

• Simple, single point of management
• High performance and reliability
• Good scalability for future growth
• Good price/performance and improved ROI

With the flexible scaling offered by ESVA, McAfee’s TME Lab can dynamically expand the storage pool by simply adding additional ESVA systems as their data needs grow. A pool can be scaled to provide up to 768 drives.

Additionally, ESVA freed up rack space and reduced energy consumption for McAfee’s TME Lab, and has saved the company up to 60% in time and human resource expenditures.

McAfee's TME Lab Storage Environment

Scalable Virtualized Architecture Handles Performance Demands

Based on a scalable virtualized storage architecture, ESVA provides the most effective utilization of pooled storage capacity and bandwidth. ESVA offers the midrange storage market the throughput power which typically could only be found in high-end storage systems -- at an affordable price.

Ease-of-Management Saves Time

The storage pool created by Infortrend’s ESVA greatly simplifies management, presenting a single point of administration. Scaling the storage pool is also an easy task – all scaling and data migration tasks can be done without disrupting service. Each ESVA subsystem can be scaled for massive capacity by connecting with expansion enclosures. The virtualized foundation can also be scaled out, by adding additional ESVA arrays. When a new system is added, ESVA’s distributed load balancing technology dynamically balances workloads among member storage systems, enabling processing power to grow minimally.