Larsen & Toubro Hazira

Larsen & Toubro Hazira Deploys IP-SAN to consolidate, simplify management and ensure high availability of its growing information assets

Customer Case Study

Located 300 kms north of Mumbai, on

the Arabian Sea, L&T Hazira is a two
square kilometer campus. The
campus wide network consists of a
Cisco layer-3 switched network backbone that serves traditional intranet
services like email, web, file, print
services as well ERP to its users. The
campus has about 600 desktops that
access a central storage of around
150 GB, available as DAS to the
various servers.
In early 2004, L&T deployed a thin
client solution on the campus network
to enable centralized network management, to reduce complexity of software administration, improve information security management, rapid
deployment of business continuity
processes and to overall provide a
more stable and higher quality service
to its network users.
L&T also deployed a state-of-art
Intransa IP-SAN solution, as a storage

backend to its thin-client solution. Built

around the Intransa IP5000 storage
system, the IP-SAN simplifies management and ensures high availability
of L&T Hazira's rapidly growing information assets.

ability across the enterprise network.

And all this at significantly lower costs
per megabyte of data stored.

L&T Graduates from DS

to IP-SAN

The Intransa IP5000, an IP-based

SAN solution, is a modular, IP-based
block-storage (Storage Area Network)
array from 4TB up to 24TB raw capacity. The IP5000 leverages existing
Ethernet network infrastructures to
offer a scalable and easily managed
solution at roughly one-fifth of the
price of today's Fibre Channel SANs.
Consisting of a storage controller
module and a disk enclosure, the
IP5000 centralizes storage devices to
make them available for sharing
across a network, delivering better utilization by reducing the need to purchase individual servers to increase
storage needs.

For a while, DAS proved to be a cost

effective and adequate storage solution to support various application,
database, mail, and file servers on the
campus network at L&T Hazira.
Physically connected to host servers
through a SCSI cable, these DAS
devices, mostly DLTtape and DAT
drives, performed backup and restore
functions
periodically.
In
time,
however, the limitations of DAS
began to surface.
In a typical DAS environment, each
storage device is connected to a single
server and the storage can only be
viewed and accessed through the
operating system of the attached server. As a result, when there are multiple
storage and server pairs it becomes
increasingly difficult for an IS staff to
manage and track data on each individual server.
Consequently, in early 2004, L&T
Hazira decided to deploy an Intransa
IP-SAN solution, arguably the first such
solution in India, as a storage backend
to its thin-client solution deployed on its
campus wide network.
V A Khargonkar, Asst. General
Manager, IT, L&T, Hazira , Surat ,
observes With the Intransa IP-SAN
solution, we are finally able to easily
manage
our
growing
storage
resources and deliver high data avail-

Intransa IP-SAN fits L&T's

requirement perfectly

The StorControl GUI, a java application that is setup on a network

administrator's workstation, enables
administrators to increase storage
capacity 'on the fly' via a simple 'drag
and drop' function of the volume bar.
This flexible resource allocation dramatically simplifies how L&T plans
and allocates its storage capacity and
allows the company to dynamically
assign unused storage to servers during times of high demand and then
reallocate that same storage when it is
no longer needed.

Backups are no longer

a pain

A significant challenge of L&T's DAS

configuration was the effort and time
required for backup and restore procedures. Each DAS island required
that data be streamed across the net-

work to the backup/restore systems,

leading to heavy network utilization. In
the past, this was not an issue due to
a big backup window. However, with
its expanding operations, L&T's backup window continues to shrink rapidly.
KEY BUSINESS & IT BENEFITS
Storage Provisioning On The Fly
With the IP5000, L&T is now able to
dynamically grow and provision its
storage to individual hosts and
expand volumes for individual applications or users with no disruptions
or downtime on the server, a significant benefit compared to its previous DAS configuration. Each time
L&T needs to add more storage
capacity all they need to do is mount
a new disk enclosure in the rack and
plug the Ethernet cable to the
Gigabit Ethernet switch. The IP5000
storage controller will automatically
recognize the new disks and make
free space available for the IT staff
to provision to host servers.
Space Storage Capacity
Management
The IP5000 also dramatically
improves the efficiency of Intransa's
spare storage capacity by creating a
global spare for all the disks in the
system so that when a failure occurs
the IP5000 will put the spare to
use automatically.

Utilizing the IP5000 intelligent IP SAN

architecture, L&T has created a centralized pool of storage to ease its
backup and restore methods and
reduce the completion time. Backups
are now run directly on the back-end
storage network rather than the userfacing front-end network. An incremental backup of all the servers can be
bypassed altogether by leveraging
Intransa Snapshot technology.
In addition to simplifying backup, the
IP5000 also enables instantaneous
restore from disk via mounting the
snapshot volume. Whereas its DAS
configuration required tape cartridges
to be physically changed on each server, the IP5000 enables the continually
growing backup log files to be kept
online, thereby facilitating quick identification of archived data for restoring.
Furthermore, the snapshot home directory can now be set-up so that users
can complete restoration on their own
instantly, significantly reducing help
desk requests to allow IT technicians to
spend their time on other projects.
On the other key criteria for choosing
the IP-SAN solution, Mr. Khargonkar &
their System Administrators said, We
were keen on a storage solution that
made use of our existing skills sets. We

Simplifies Clustering Management

of Storage System
The iSCSI-based IP5000 also simplifies clustering and management
of the storage system with its
StorControl Management Tool that
allows IT administrators at L&T to
manage and monitor the entire
IP5000 system, automate tasks and
even assign individual volumes.

2005, Intransa, Inc. All

rights reserved. This case
study is for informational
purposes only.
INTRANSA MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.

United States of America

Intransa, Inc.
2870 Zanker Road. Suite 200
San Jose, CA 95134
Main: 408.678.8600
Fax: 408.678.8800

For More Information

For more information about
Intransa products or services,
visit us at www.intransa.com
or send an email to
sales@intransa.com.

were delighted to find, during the Pilot

Phase, that the IP-SAN solution from
Intransa could be implemented and
managed with no major training
requirements for our staff. This certainly made a big difference

What next
L&T initially procured a 1.6 TB centralized storage solution for file serving
purposes; it shall now be implementing
Box-to-Box mirroring solution for
Disaster recovery.

About Intransa
Intransa, with headquarters in San
Jose, California, is an innovator of
enterprise-class, intelligent IP storage
products and software. Based on
advanced technology that leverages
the low cost and maturity of Ethernet
technology, Intransa's IP storage solutions dramatically reduce the cost and
complexity of deploying scalable network storage. Intransa's products have
re-defined network storage to deliver
the first full-featured IP SAN at a price
attractive to all levels of the enterprise.
Backed
by
3Com,
Advanced
Technology Ventures, Sofinnova
Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, US
Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures,
Intransa has secured a total of $74 million in three rounds of funding.