Managing a large, diverse data center environment posed significant challenges for Acxiom Corp.'s IT staff. As its customer database grew, configuration flexibility and storage scalability became more critical.

The Little Rock, AR, company assists Fortune 500 and other well-known businesses with customer- and information-management solutions, and keeps a large repository of consumer data, used to populate an enormous number of customer-specific database solutions. The company maintains several petabytes of storage capacity.

Acxiom's storage needs had progressed greatly since its direct-attached storage (DAS) days in the early 1990s. The DAS solutions had become too difficult to scale without limiting the servers' ability to re-deploy the storage unless it was physically re-mapped or re-channelled. The company's SCSI-based, direct-attached storage model made supporting faster data rates and longer windows of operation for customers difficult.

With a highly increased demand for scaling, the company decided to shift from DAS to storage area networks (SANs) to be able to handle storage in the tens of terabytes range, as well as having multiple servers attached. Customers were requiring that data transfer rates be in excess of two gigabytes per second.

Says Greg Cherry, technical systems leader for outsourcing and IT services organization, "The increased data rates, the rising amount of storage capacity and the need to connect multiple servers in a single infrastructure necessitated a more flexible approach to storage. As a result, we decided to migrate from direct-attached storage to a Fibre Channel-based SAN.

"SANs could give us the flexibility to build solutions very quickly, scale upward or downward as necessary, and move storage as requirements changed," Cherry adds. "We thought we could manage our heterogeneous server and storage environments more efficiently."

Acxiom deployed several small SANs, as well as a large 40-switch SAN-all based on Brocade Communications' SilkWorm 2800 fabric switches. The switches provided interoperability with the many types of servers-IBM, Compaq, HP and Sun-in use at the company's data centers. The heterogeneous SAN environment, which includes more than 500 terabytes of data, enables use of the current server and storage resources more efficiently, while leveraging the staff's existing skills to streamline SAN deployment and management.

One of the attributes of SANs discovered during the implementation process was how easy the solution was to deploy, a key criterion because Acxiom is continuously adding storage and making improvements to the system.

The company is in the process of migrating its direct-attached tape subsystems to fabric-patched tape solutions to allow sharing of tape libraries across multiple servers, while minimizing disruption to the production environment. Acxiom will also have the ability, through its SAN, to access these tape libraries.

Higher performance and sharing a common storage pool between multiple server environments are other advantages. "Because we can share multiple tape libraries across multiple servers, we can build a more robust backup-and-recovery solution," Cherry explains. "Instead of processing tens to hundreds of gigabytes an hour, we can now reach data backup rates in excess of a terabyte an hour."

In the event of a disaster, a fiber-based SAN will allow the company to deploy business-continuity solutions requested by clients. With the higher performance and reliability of the SANs and long-distance fiber connectivity, such solutions are more cost-effective and more easily deployed.

"Brocade Fabric OS is critical for simplifying SAN management, especially as we scale our solutions and build security into our storage," Cherry says.