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Storage: Which Technology Should You Choose

For a company whose bread and butter is producing crude oil, Newfield Exploration’s storage environment was fast running out of ...

By Cindy Waxer

August 01, 2006 — CIO — For a company whose bread and butter is producing crude oil, Newfield Exploration’s storage environment was fast running out of gas. Saddled with a mix of disparate systems, platforms and applications, the $1.7 billion Houston company’s storage environment was "a mess," according to Mark Spicer, Newfield’s vice president of IT. Servers had to be rebooted twice a day to ensure availability, and keeping tabs on an overburdened architecture was draining scarce IT resources. With a workforce growing at an annual rate of 20 percent, Newfield Exploration was in desperate need of greater storage capacity.

"We were just starting to reach critical mass, so we really needed to overhaul the whole storage system to plan for growth," says Spicer.

Newfield Exploration could have opted for age-old fibre channel technology. Instead, in early 2003 the company turned to NetApp for its iSCSI-based storage area network. Unlike with traditional network storage protocols such as fibre channel, operating iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) requires only an Ethernet interface or any other TCP/IP-capable network. Gone is the pricey equipment and specialized hardware knowledge often demanded of a fibre channel (FC) SAN deployment. With iSCSI, the promise is that companies can achieve a low-cost and easy-to-maintain centralization of storage.

While it was risky to take a chance on a relatively new storage solution such as iSCSI, Spicer says the decision has paid off. By implementing NetApp iSCSI connectivity to store Windows application data such as Exchange stores, Web stores and SQL Server databases, Newfield Exploration has improved performance by 20 percent, leveraged its existing Ethernet infrastructure and greatly expanded storage capacity without having to add personnel—a cost savings of at least $85,000 a year.

Newfield Exploration is just one of many midsize companies gradually making the move to iSCSI. Businesses have long relied on FC-SANs to offer rapid data transfer rates, enormous bandwidth and highly predictable performance for mission-¿critical applications. Such peak performance is especially critical to companies that depend on applications for processing sensitive financial information and confidential customer data. But the arrival of iSCSI has heralded a user-friendly—and considerably cheaper—alternative for midsize and cash-strapped businesses. And vendors such as EMC, EqualLogic, Hewlett-Packard and NetApp, are fast catching on to the trend, making iSCSI a key part of their storage solution portfolios.

iSCSI Pros and Cons

The allure of iSCSI is easy to understand. Whereas an FC-SAN deployment calls for the installation of a high-priced host bus adapter and drivers, all it takes to connect a server to an iSCSI network is a gigabit Ethernet network interface card. Such ease-of-use is particularly attractive to today’s midsize businesses with limited IT resources and tight budgets. And where FC-SANs often demand a hefty investment in storage administrators, most IT professionals already possess a considerable knowledge of Ethernet technology.

 

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