Financial Bureau of Ili Prefecture at China Xinjiang Achieves 85% Better Data Access Efficiency with Infortrend Storage

Financial Bureau of Ili Prefecture at China Xinjiang Achieves 85% Better Data Access Efficiency with Infortrend Storage

Ili is one of the seven prefectures in China’s Xinjiang region, covering an area of 280 thousand square kilometers. The financial bureau of Ili Prefecture is responsible for making fiscal plans and regulatory frameworks to support a strong prefectural economy and deliver sustainable services to more than 4 million residents.

The Challenges: Performance, Capacity and Availability

The key application in the IT environment of the financial bureau is an asset management database. During peak workloads, there are more than 300 users accessing the Oracle-based database for data queries each day, generating about 0.5GB of data. These asset records are important references for reviewing economical state and making fiscal plans. To ensure smooth operation of the financial bureau, the data have to be made quickly accessible in their full integrity.

After years of development, the old storage systems could no longer keep up with the performance, capacity and availability required by the data of growing amount and importance. With limited budgets, the financial bureau was expecting a new storage system which can meet the following requirements:

• delivers high throughput power to handle heavy workloads and make quick responses to data queries
• provides more than 12TB of capacity and can be scaled to accommodate future data growth
• soundly protects data for continuous operation
• great price/performance
• centralized platform for simple and quick configuration and administration
• wide support of operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris

The Solution: EonStor S16F-R1430

Under the recommendation of UDSAFE, Infortrend’s leading distributor in China, the financial bureau chose Infortrend EonStor S16F-R1430 for its system upgrade. At competitive price points, the S16F storage system provides the following features to satisfactorily deal with the challenging data demands:

• enables high-speed data transfer through four 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) host ports
• supports sixteen 3.5-inch SAS drives in a single 3U system
• incrementally expands to house a maximum of 64 drives through expansion enclosures
• redundant, hot-swappable controllers, power supplies and fans
• full hardware-based RAID level support, including RAID 1, 1(0+1), 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60 and JBOD
• shipped with SANWatch management suite, which allows access to all configuration and maintenance functions via a single intuitive and easy-to-use interface
• compatible with various operating systems and application software

The Benefits: 85% Better Efficiency and High Data Availability

Infortrend storage brings benefits to the financial bureau in the stage as early as deployment. Initiating an EonStor storage system for application requires no additional training but only easy cabling and quick configuration on the user-friendly GUI. In a high-speed FC SAN, EonStor S16F system delivers outstanding throughput power to greatly promote work efficiency. The time taken to access an asset record is reduced from 20 to 3 seconds. The daily batch-processing job which used to take 2 hours to complete can be done in 30 minutes now. Moreover, with the old storage system, simultaneous access from 100 users could cause delays or even downtime. Now the EonStor storage system can smoothly handle simultaneous queries from more than 300 users while ensuring prompt responses.

The EonStor system provides ample space to store current data of the financial bureau. Even if the data later grow beyond the limit, IT managers can connect the system with expansion enclosures to scale capacity in a “pay as your grow” way. During hardware component malfunction and drive failure, the storage system depends on high availability designs and full RAID protection to keep the mission-critical applications up and running. On the full-featured management platform, IT managers can leverage advanced functions, such as disk performance monitor, automatic event notification and real-time status view, to further optimize the storage infrastructure for high availability, efficiency and performance.