EarthLink deploys tiered EMC networked storage strategy

EMC Corporation announced today that EarthLink, one of the nation`s leading Internet service providers, is rolling out a sophisticated tiered storage strategy aimed at enhancing performance, lowering storage acquisition costs and staying ahead of continued business growth.

EarthLink is implementing EMC`s broad range of networked storage - Symmetrix DMX, CLARiiON CX, CLARiiON with ATA and Celerra NS600 network attached storage (NAS) - to address its networked storage requirements.

EarthLink uses EMC ControlCenter software for streamlined, centralized management of its diverse EMC infrastructure and soon will use it to manage an HDS 9960 storage system.

Ronald Williams, EarthLink`s Senior Manager, Infrastructure Operations Architecture, said: "Our network benefits from the maximum strength delivered through EMC`s high-end storage. Symmetrix DMX is ideal for those instances where we need absolute uptime assurance, top performance under any load and the ability to scale performance linearly with the architecture. By offering us a broad range of storage systems and software to choose from, EMC helps us meet our overall business requirements and lowers our storage acquisition costs."

Williams added: "With a growing base of five million subscribers, we have an information technology environment that manages and records millions of transactions every month. EMC Symmetrix DMX`s exceptional performance will support our business growth today and into the future. Our benchmarking has shown that Symmetrix DMX runs certain functions six times faster than other systems. This dramatic acceleration has reduced some of our batch windows from eight hours to four and has speeded up our backup process by 300%. Our billing operations are running faster, ensuring we can invoice our growing customer base in a timely manner. Our massive number of data warehouse queries are processed more quickly, which allows business users to analyse and solve business problems faster. Symmetrix DMX provides a significant performance edge."

EarthLink`s EMC infrastructure encompasses three tiers across its corporate applications:

Tier one: Symmetrix DMX1000 networked storage systems support high-end applications such as billing, data warehousing and Oracle, which require three or more terabytes of data. EarthLink has found that DMX delivers sustained peak performance for predictably high workloads and during unexpected bursts of activity. The DMX networked storage systems serve Sun Solaris, Dell and Compaq Windows 2000, and Red Hat Linux servers.

Tier two: EarthLink is consolidating Compaq Windows and Sun storage on EMC CLARiiON CX600 networked storage systems to deliver improved performance and efficiency to less service-level-intensive applications, such as call centre management, PeopleSoft and customer relationship management (CRM).

In addition, EarthLink values the interoperability, high availability and lower cost of EMC`s mid-tier NAS solution, the Celerra NS600. EarthLink is consolidating five Dell and Compaq Windows NT servers onto the NS600 to provide file sharing to its employees.

Said Williams: "EMC`s Celerra NS600 satisfies our NAS needs for availability, performance and management perfectly. NS600 has improved our user availability - which is absolutely key since employees will rely on it for file sharing. Because we are centralising file sharing onto the Celerra NS600, we expect our system administration load to decrease. The NS600 is extremely easy to deploy and offers cost-efficient, seamless expandability to keep pace with our growth."

Tier three: EarthLink is implementing the CLARiiON CX600 with integrated ATA drives for highly cost-sensitive applications such as quality assurance (QA) and backups, which still require online performance and availability.

Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, EarthLink is implementing EMC`s family of ControlCenter software, which includes StorageScope, Common Array Manager and WorkLoad Analyzer, to simplify and automate storage management across both EMC`s 30-terabyte infrastructure and the HDS 9960. EarthLink`s other EMC software solutions include TimeFinder, PowerPath, Navisphere and SnapView.

"A single point of control enhances our system administration and delivers more consistent, lower-cost management because ControlCenter will automate many of our tasks," said Williams. "We will be able to collect better data about our storage allocation and utilisation."