Case Study: More Group incorporates Emulex’s LightPulse HBA for storage solution

By Emulex Corporation:

www.Emulex.com
March 09, 2008

Back Up and Safely Store the Data

This simple mantra of information technology management is a frequent source of added cost, complexity and outright frustration for organizations of every type and size, from sole proprietor businesses to multinational corporations. All too often the back-up and restore strategy ends up being an afterthought in information system design and implementation, in spite of the potentially disastrous effects of lost or damaged data files. The data storage experts at More Group of Middleboro, Massachusetts, recognized that risk as a business opportunity and designed a service that delivers a simple and cost-effective path to reliable back-up and recovery.

More Group, Inc. is a storage management integrator offering a range of solutions and services to protect organizations’ valuable information. The company’s team of storage integration professionals employs decades of combined experience in designing, deploying and supporting scalable storage solutions to meet customers’ needs.

In the spring of 2006, More Group launched MoreStor Vault, an online backup and recovery service that makes enterprise-class data protection simple and affordable. The service clearly strikes a chord with business managers, as more than 300 organizations have signed on, growing the total volume of storage to more than 20 Terabytes (TB) in a little more than one year.

“We’ve seen a surprising range of clients, from accountants and attorneys with a need to secure 10-20 Gigabytes of data, to mid-size firms and departments of larger enterprises that may utilize several Terabytes,” said Brian Baker, director of the MoreStor Vault service. “In all cases, we deliver a robust service that is brought up on existing IT infrastructure in one or two days, with no up-front costs and a straightforward monthly fee billing model.”

The infrastructure supporting the MoreStor Vault service is based on a flexible and highly scalable back-end server and storage area network (SAN). At the heart of this storage infrastructure, Emulex LightPulse host bus adapters (HBAs) provide highly-reliable connectivity for IBM xSeries servers interfacing with Hitachi TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) disk arrays.

Client-side Simplicity Masks Powerful Features

Baker explains that the key to the apparent simplicity of MoreStor Vault is its agentless architecture. The client-side software is loaded onto a single server or dedicated appliance at the customer site. It seamlessly integrates with the existing network infrastructure to handle back-up scheduling and data capture, on-site compression and encryption, and transmission via internet link to the MoreStor Vault data center. The total volume of data stored is automatically managed—utilizing techniques such as delta blocking, common-file elimination and compression—to both improve performance of the system and manage customer cost (which is based on the data storage volume used).

The client-side software has negligible impact on the customer’s compute resources—servers, desktops and laptops—since it eliminates the CPU-cycle hits associated with agent-based models. It also self-upgrades, so there is no time and resource draining push of new agents or revisions to client side systems. Other benefits of the system include robust, hard-coded security using a private encryption key for full protection of both in-flight and at rest client data. And, a Local Restore tool allows local storage of the backed up data, supporting immediate restores of critical data at LAN speeds.

Baker attributes much of the market success of MoreStor Vault to the growing emphasis on both organizational security and compliance, and the company’s responsiveness to customer requirements. This led to introduction of a laptop or desktop back-up solution, which is proving popular with enterprise customers that have significant numbers of remote workers or internal desktops that are not currently protected. Regardless of the industry served or size of the customer’s storage requirements, the service fills the need for reliable and cost-effective data protection and recovery across all common operating systems and business applications for a fixed monthly cost.

Secure, Scalable Storage Infrastructure

At a data center in Marlboro, Massachusetts, and replication site in New Jersey, proprietary system-side software manages the growing on-line repository of data received from hundreds of MoreStor Vault clients. The system software resides on a redundant cluster of IBM eServer X3 systems. The SAN is built around robust Hitachi AMS storage arrays, featuring dual controllers (no single point-failure), RAID 6 and tiered storage capability, Brocade switches and Emulex LightPulse 2Gb/s and 4Gb/s Dual-Channel Fibre Channel HBAs, providing reliable SAN connectivity.

Choosing Emulex LightPulse HBAs to provide SAN connectivity was an easy decision for the system planners. As a trusted repository for data from hundreds of different companies, rock-solid reliability was a key priority. Also, the storage infrastructure is designed to scale and evolve to accommodate increasing volume and future advances in storage technology. Emulex’s strength as a supplier of both HBA and embedded SAN connectivity to all leading infrastructure providers is an assurance that future expansion options will not be limited by device compatibility issues.

“The More Group team is very familiar with Emulex LightPulse HBAs, with many years of experience integrating the technology as part of our storage solutions business,” said Baker. “The common HBA driver architecture translates to consistency as we scale the system, which today has a mix of 2Gb/s and 4Gb/s cards. We also knew that Emulex has strong relationships with our system providers, HDS and IBM, which provides added assurance to our specification for the hardware environment.” Many of the 300-plus customers using MoreStor Vault also maintain virtual server clients in the secure data center, supporting full disaster recovery capability in the event of catastrophic data loss or system failure at a customer site. Virtual clients may be configured in any of the many operating systems supported by the service. The firmware independent, common driver model of Emulex HBAs helps minimize the complexity of system support in the data center.

The infrastructure supporting the MoreStor Vault service is based on a flexible and highly scalable back-end server and storage area network (SAN). At the heart of this storage infrastructure, Emulex LightPulse host bus adapters (HBAs) provide highly reliable connectivity for IBM xSeries servers interfacing with Hitachi TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) disk arrays.

Poised for Growth

“No matter what type of business you are in today, you need to be able to not only back up your information, but recover that data quickly” said Baker. “Also, a big part of the demand we are seeing for this solution comes from customers with compliance obligations, such as HIPAA in medical and health care environments, and corporations subject to Sarbanes-Oxley and related securities industry regulation.”

The MoreStor Vault team is capitalizing on this demand with plans to scale the system’s overall capability while expanding its presence in the market. A new data center is planned in the Midwest, and the company is looking to potential international markets. The simplicity and rock-solid reliability of the service also makes it ideal for resale by channel partners. With expansion in both geographic scope and distribution channels, More Group sees continued expansion of the storage infrastructure, with Emulex HBAs as a keystone of the SAN.

“We consistently find that customers think of back-up and recovery as a very complex, resource-consuming aspect of the information technology system,” said Baker. “With MoreStor Vault, we make it a simple, automated process for any organization to protect its data, and thus protect its business.”