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Press Release - 6 December 2011
Coraid EtherDrive SAN is The Latest Addition to The Family at Geneaology Site Notrefamille.com
Paris, France – Coraid® Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,500 customers worldwide, has been selected by Notrefamille.com, operator of France’s leading genealogy site, to upgrade its data storage so that its massive repository of data records are protected and storage performance is increased.
From its head quarters in Paris, Notrefamille.com operates multiple internet portals including www.notrefamille.com for women and their families, www.genealogie.com, a reference service for French-speaking genealogists, and www.cadeaux.com, a personalised gift site. As a result, the company’s Microsoft SQL databases contain hundreds of millions of records, while a repository containing thousands of digital images is also available to users. This information needs to be available 24/7 and its rapid growth cannot become a hindrance to the IT team’s ability to manage and scale the storage infrastructure. Therefore a high-performance IT infrastructure is critical for Notrefamille.com, although capex and opex are also priorities as they allow the business to remain competitive.
Prior to the deployment of Coraid EtherDrive, Notrefamille.com had been relying on a Fibre Channel SAN; however, when the time came to upgrade, the cost was found to be very high. The user therefore turned to Alyseo, a leading French storage and virtualisation integrator, to help design a storage environment that would scale with the business, provide assured performance and reduce downtime, all with the economics of standard, off-the-shelf hardware.
“The high opex on our Fibre Channel SAN encouraged us to look for an alternative that would give us similar or better performance while making our budget stretch further,” said Nicolas Menoux, CTO of Notrefamille.com. “Ideally we wanted a solution that would be more efficient, easier to manage, and that would not involve proprietary hardware. We thought it might be a tall order but when the team at Alyseo showed us what Coraid could do, we knew our search was over.”
The integrator assisted Notrefamille.com in the design and deployment of a production storage system based on the Coraid EtherDrive Ethernet SAN and transitioned the genealogy database, user photos, and all the websites to the new infrastructure. This involved connecting multiple servers to the Coraid SAN, including a Microsoft Windows file server for the photographs, an image processing server, a Microsoft SQL database for the records, and a secondary SQL database tied to a snapshot of the test database.
“Coraid is a game changer and at Alyseo we always aim to bring our customers the latest and most innovative storage and virtualisation technologies. We were an early adopter of Ethernet SAN and believe it provides the right architecture and economics for the modern data centre. By combining high performance, scale-out storage into a holistic IT solution, we can help our clients greatly reduce their costs and simplify their operations," added Yacine Kheddache, CTO at Alyseo.
The snapshot capabilities of Coraid EtherDrive VSX were used to provide just-in-time copies of the databases to ensure that important records were backed up. The storage was deployed in a no-single-point-of-failure architecture by coupling the Coraid EtherDrive VSX storage virtualisation appliance with the EtherDrive SRX 4200, which was serving 72TB of raw storage. Each Coraid system was mirrored with dual paths from the server HBAs through Ethernet switches. This fully redundant configuration ensures that no single hardware failure can cause a halt in operations, a key requirement for any internet-based business.
Nicolas Menoux has already witnessed significant cost and performance benefits, “With Coraid, the scale out of data is less expensive than with a Fibre Channel SAN; when we want to add more storage we just add another unit, without worrying about getting hit with a big bill. The Coraid system was about 25% less than the cost of our previous storage yet its performance is just as high and its ease of use means we didn’t have to spend much time or money on training the team. The addition of the new storage to our Windows server environment was seamless and completed ahead of schedule.”
Marcos Burnett, Coraid’s EMEA sales director, added, “By enabling high-performance at a fraction of the price of comparable Fibre Channel designs, Ethernet storage provides an innovative and proven technology that many European organisations are adopting to upgrade their SANs.”