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| > developer > success |
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| XIOtech |
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| MAGNITUDE* |
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| Steinbach Credit Union uses MAGNITUDE and NetWare® to provide business continuity via wireless SAN disaster recovery solution. |
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XIOtech Corporation provides comprehensive storage solutions for Novell NetWare and other leading platforms. “XIOtech has worked with Novell’s DeveloperNet® program for years to take advantage of Novell solutions’ features and benefits,” said Tom DiPuma, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at XIOtech. “XIOtech’s MAGNITUDE storage platform is YES, Tested and Approved™ for NetWare, and certified with Novell Cluster Services™ (NCS).”
XIOtech, a Novell DeveloperNet Professional member, also works closely with Novell engineers to improve the storage portion of NetWare and NCS to take advantage of the features and benefits of XIOtech’s MAGNITUDE platform. The capability of NetWare 6 to utilize expanded MAGNITUDE LUNs on the fly without rebooting is one example of this ongoing joint development. XIOtech’s MAGNITUDE platform was also one of the first storage devices from which NetWare servers were able to boot directly, to further decouple the server from storage. |
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situation before XIOtech solution | ||||||||
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With 51,000 members and $1.3 billion in assets, Steinbach Credit Union of Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada offers consumer, agricultural and commercial loans, savings and checking accounts, asset management, ATM and credit cards, and online banking and bill payment. In 2000, as the organization expanded to include a second branch and data center in Winnipeg, IT manager Lloyd Dueck and network administrator Denis Van Dale raised questions about availability and recoverability of data: "What if a tornado hit Steinbach? What if there was a fire or a flood? We'd be dead in the water, we'd have nothing. It would have taken weeks to get back up and running," Dueck said.
Dueck and Van Dale decided to take advantage of the new site by hosting a second SAN (Storage Attached Network) at the Winnipeg location. This would allow Steinbach to mirror data to and from branches, enabling fast, reliable access to customer information regardless of location. However, a high-speed data link between the sites, 30 miles apart, would have cost $70,000 per month for a 100MB Fibre Channel link or $45,000 per month for a 50MB link. "We all fell off of our chairs when we started getting the costs," Dueck said. “The other option was to forget about disaster recovery and consider a T1 line, which was unacceptable.” |
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situation after XIOtech solution | ||||||||
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Faced with high last-mile connectivity costs and without a disaster recovery (DR) plan, Steinbach Credit Union developed an innovative solution to rein in costs. Geography also factored into the firm's technology decisions. "Manitoba is as flat as a pancake," notes Van Dale. "There are no mountain ranges to deal with, and we are a considerable distance from the center where the major carrier networks are located."
After some research, the team discovered that a line-of-sight digital radio system using iFCP† to replicate data between the two locations offered a cost-efficient solution, costing less than $200,000 for the complete implementation. "It was a eureka! moment," said Van Dale. The team chose two XIOtech MAGNITUDE storage platforms, one for primary data in Steinbach and one for replicated data in Winnipeg. Nishan IP storage switches convert Fibre Channel traffic to iFCP for transport and then back to Fibre Channel, and Proxim Wireless LAN bridges. To step down bandwidth for transport, they implemented Gigabit Ethernet-to-Fast Ethernet switches. To transmit signal, there is a 100-foot radio tower at each branch, and equidistant between the two sites is a 150-foot tower. The wireless link is secured with Proxim data encryption. Steinbach now runs all IP network traffic directly between its facilities in Steinbach and Winnipeg without third-party carriers or expensive last-mile services. "There would be about a two-year return on investment when comparing the cost of leased lines," Dueck said. It also saved having to purchase servers annually for roughly $50,000. The new solution provides Steinbach customers with 24x7 access to financial information. "Customers can walk into either office and the information is there," Dueck said. Another significant benefit was the ability to create an integrated phone system on the wireless LAN. Not only has Steinbach cut long-distance charges by a third, calls are sent immediately over the network no matter which branch they originate from. Steinbach’s network consists of a NetWare 5.1 server running BorderManager® 3.7, and two clustered NetWare 6.1 servers, one for file, print, and iFolder®, etc., the other running GroupWise® 6.1 and serving as the secondary server. From 170 workstations in Steinbach and 80 in the Winnipeg branch, all users log into NetWare servers in Steinbach. E-mail, Internet access, file and print services are hosted in Steinbach. 60 percent of the wireless bandwidth is reserved for mirroring the SANs, and the remainder is for IP telephony, data access, e-mail and Internet connectivity. “Over the years, we’ve felt some pressure to move away from Novell to Microsoft, but we aren’t interested in starting over with less secure, less reliable platforms,” said Van Dale. “NetWare is rock solid and tightly integrated with XIOtech MAGNITUDE storage platform. And GroupWise is the lifeblood of our daily business activity. It’s secure and easy to use for our account managers, who appreciate its proxy calendaring/scheduling capabilities.” |
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| Together, Novell and XIOtech are dedicated to helping customers solve unique business problems and reach new levels of operating efficiency. But credit for the world’s first wireless SAN implementation goes to Steinbach’s IT staff for bringing the complete solution together, laying a foundation for business growth, and saving lots of money in the process. | |||||||||
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©2003 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo, NetWare, GroupWise, BorderManager, and iFolder are registered trademarks and eDirectory, YES, Tested and Approved, Novell Cluster Services are trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
*All other third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners. † iFCP is a TCP/IP-based protocol for interconnecting Fibre Channel storage devices or SANs using IP infrastructure with, or in place of, Fibre Channel switching and routing elements. †† Steinbach’s wireless backup and disaster recovery solution won the silver medal in the SearchStorage.com Spring 2003 Storage Innovator awards competition for its unique approach to replicating a storage area network. This is the second straight year for a Novell/XIOtech customer to win this prestigious award. |
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