Case Study: Eisenhower & Carlson chooses Intel® Modular Server
I am the sole IT staff person for Eisenhower & Carlson, PLLC, a midsize law firm with offices in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. At the time of the phone call, we had three VSphere* servers with 15 guest servers linked to a network switch and an iSCSI SAN (storage area network) via a nest of cables.
Server Room Meltdown
The attorney at the other end of the line reported that none of the servers seemed to be functioning. He had a rush job and was anxious about the network standstill. I hastily logged in remotely and noticed that things were indeed not well. The SAN had shut down four hard drives; two of these drives were in the same RAID 5 group. Having no idea what was going on, I rushed into the office to check it out. The building air conditioning had shut down as part of a seasonal heating and cooling system cycle change. The SAN ran hot anyway, so a change in the passive cooling tipped it over the edge and caused it to fail.
Solution: Replace the SAN with Intel® Modular Server
After this incident, the reliability of our SAN was suspect. Any time a computer system overheats, its reliability—especially that of the hard drives—is thereafter unknown. Plus, our SAN was almost out of warranty, so we would soon lose support. I explained to my management that we should replace the SAN as soon as possible. However, the prices that came in shocked everyone, including me.
So I came up with an alternative. The Intel Modular Server is an integrated solution for businesses of our size that combines computing, storage, and networking in a single chassis. We had installed only two (of six possible) Intel® Server Compute Modules in our Intel Modular Server, and these Server Compute Modules ran VMware ESX* and hosted a number of virtual machines already. I priced the cost of adding more RAM, and found the price differential to be shocking: USD 1,800 to add storage to the SAN on our Intel Modular Server, versus USD 15,000 to 30,000 for a new standalone SAN.
Read the full Eisenhower and Carlson Chooses Intel® Modular Server Case Study.
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Case Study: Eisenhower & Carlson chooses Intel® Modular Server
I am the sole IT staff person for Eisenhower & Carlson, PLLC, a midsize law firm with offices in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. At the time of the phone call, we had three VSphere* servers with 15 guest servers linked to a network switch and an iSCSI SAN (storage area network) via a nest of cables.
Server Room Meltdown
The attorney at the other end of the line reported that none of the servers seemed to be functioning. He had a rush job and was anxious about the network standstill. I hastily logged in remotely and noticed that things were indeed not well. The SAN had shut down four hard drives; two of these drives were in the same RAID 5 group. Having no idea what was going on, I rushed into the office to check it out. The building air conditioning had shut down as part of a seasonal heating and cooling system cycle change. The SAN ran hot anyway, so a change in the passive cooling tipped it over the edge and caused it to fail.
Solution: Replace the SAN with Intel® Modular Server
After this incident, the reliability of our SAN was suspect. Any time a computer system overheats, its reliability—especially that of the hard drives—is thereafter unknown. Plus, our SAN was almost out of warranty, so we would soon lose support. I explained to my management that we should replace the SAN as soon as possible. However, the prices that came in shocked everyone, including me.
So I came up with an alternative. The Intel Modular Server is an integrated solution for businesses of our size that combines computing, storage, and networking in a single chassis. We had installed only two (of six possible) Intel® Server Compute Modules in our Intel Modular Server, and these Server Compute Modules ran VMware ESX* and hosted a number of virtual machines already. I priced the cost of adding more RAM, and found the price differential to be shocking: USD 1,800 to add storage to the SAN on our Intel Modular Server, versus USD 15,000 to 30,000 for a new standalone SAN.
Read the full Eisenhower and Carlson Chooses Intel® Modular Server Case Study.
