Case Study: AGFA Corporation
Solution OverviewCustomer ProfileAgfa Corporation is the U.S. subsidiary of the Agfa-Gevaert Group, which ranks among the world's leading graphic systems companies. It is one of the top suppliers of prepress systems, and approximately 40 percent of all commercial printing worldwide uses Agfa products. Business SituationAgfa needed a distributed storage solution that is quick to set up and is accessible to Windows®-based, UNIX, and Macintosh clients simultaneously. SolutionAdvanced Media Services provided a Windows Powered NAS solution that is reliable, easy to manage, and simultaneously supports Windows-based, UNIX, and Macintosh clients. Benefits
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Company Overview
Agfa Corporation is the U.S. subsidiary of the Agfa Gevaert Group, which ranks among the world's leading graphic systems companies. Agfa is one of the top suppliers in the prepress market, providing a variety of services and automated solutions for the commercial printing market. Approximately 40 percent of all commercial printing worldwide is produced using Agfa products.
Agfa's Salient digital prepress network incorporates complex prepress technology within the company's Apogee PDF workflow solution to deliver a turnkey solution that requires only 12 square feet of space. Salient can be integrated into any existing network or stand on its own. It integrates a variety of RAID, network attached storage (NAS), and storage area network technologies into the Apogee workflow system.
Apogee enables commercial printers to easily prepare and process production jobs using the Portable Document Format (PDF), while maintaining the flexibility to make last–minute changes and reroute materials. These jobs are typically large PDF files—400 MB to 6 GB per file—of graphics components such as photos or illustrations and complete projects such as brochures, books, and packaging.
Business Challenge
"Frequently, customers will need to expand their storage quickly because they've acquired a large client," explains Chris LaFontaine, Product Manager for Systems Integration at Agfa. "The need for storage in the prepress environment is growing, and adding direct-attached storage to every server was growing increasingly expensive and inefficient. What is really needed is distributed storage across multiple servers."
Agfa's storage solution also needed to be accessible to Windows®-based, UNIX, and Macintosh clients simultaneously, which was a challenge because the majority of the NAS solutions on the market do not support Macintosh clients. In addition, the solution needed to support:
| • | Simple installation, management, and use |
| • | Gigabit Ethernet/fibre and copper connectivity |
| • | SCSI- and Fibre Channel-attached external storage expansion |
| • | Native backup and backup agents |
| • | Entry-level, mid-range, and high-end platforms |
| • | Disk-to-disk backup |
The NAS solution that Agfa chose also needed to be usable through the customer's existing client applications so that no client software or client licenses were required. Agfa contacted Advanced Media Services (AMS) of Salem, New Hampshire, to develop a solution that would meet all of those criteria.
AMS offered a Windows Powered NAS solution, based on Microsoft Windows operating system technology that is reliable, scalable, and easy to manage. The Windows Powered NAS integrates with the existing IT infrastructure and supports heterogeneous file serving as well as backup and replication of mission-critical data.
Solution
The Windows Powered NAS solution that AMS developed for Agfa's Salient network system is a highly scalable storage appliance that delivers seamless interoperability, solid reliability, and simple-to-manage storage resources in heterogeneous network environments. It can be connected to an existing network in minutes to enable Windows-based, UNIX, and Macintosh clients to share files and RAID-protected storage. Users access the storage transparently through their existing graphics applications.
The Windows Powered NAS appliance is used as the central storage server for Agfa's Apogee PDF workflow application servers and as a production server for Macintosh application users. The solution is a two-unit, rack-mounted, Intel-based server-class appliance with six hot-swappable Ultra160 SCSI disk drives and redundant, hot-swappable power supplies. A 64-bit Adaptec SCSI RAID controller protects both the operating system and the data. The system also includes:
| • | Two 10/100 Fast Ethernet network interface cards (NICs) and an additional gigabit fibre or copper NIC for network connectivity |
| • | Optional storage accelerator NIC and a Fibre Channel host adapter for high-capacity storage |
The Windows Powered NAS appliance can be expanded externally, simply by attaching a SCSI-to-SCSI, SCSI-to-Ultra ATA, or Fibre Channel-to-Fibre Channel RAID system, depending upon the customer's price or capacity requirements.
Business Benefits
The key benefits that the Windows Powered NAS provides to meet Agfa's specific prepress needs include:
| • | Support for a heterogeneous networking environment |
| • | Familiar management interface for administrators and field support technicians |
| • | Scalability to support multiple terabytes of storage |
| • | The ability to quickly add capacity as business needs grow, improving organizational agility |
| • | Low cost per unit of storage |
Easy Setup and Management
Setup for the Windows Powered NAS system takes little more than the time to plug it into the network. "With the Windows Powered NAS, when customers need to increase storage, we'll be able to ship the unit to the site, install it into the existing rack, plug it in, and go," LaFontaine says. "That's definitely a big benefit both for customers and for our technical field engineers."
Because the solution runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, administrators have the option of using the same tools that they use to manage their other Windows 2000-based application servers, so no additional training is required.
Flexible, Centralized Storage in a Heterogeneous Network Environment
The flexibility of the Windows Powered NAS enabled AMS to provide Agfa with a centralized NAS solution that functions reliably both as a Macintosh production server supporting users working on large application files—such as Quark Express and Adobe Photoshop—and as a file server for Windows 2000 Advanced Server-based Apogee application servers. “Windows 2000 Server is the only operating system that operates so seamlessly in a Windows-based, UNIX, and Macintosh production environment,” says Bob Jangro, Vice President of Advanced Media Services.
In addition to providing storage for production and application servers, the Windows Powered NAS solution also simplifies data backup and restore processes. With the Windows Powered NAS, administrators can back up all the data from the NAS and the application and production servers under one package and restore it from one backup. The Windows Powered NAS appliance can also function as a real-time data replication solution.
Increased Performance, Reduced Hardware Costs
Agfa's customers are typically working with files in the gigabyte range, which can have a significant impact on application performance. By separating the storage resources from the application servers, the Windows Powered NAS solution can handle the storage I/O requests, enabling the application servers to more efficiently handle the application requests, which helps increase productivity. And because the application servers can access one centralized, shared pool of storage rather than go to their own dedicated storage device, the Agfa Salient system can efficiently maximize storage capacity and reduce configuration and administration time.
Eliminating the need for a separate, direct-attached storage system linked to each application server is also expected to help reduce hardware costs. "Based on the direction we're taking with shared storage and on what customers traditionally directly attached to each server, we're probably going to be able to reduce their hardware costs by 30 percent by moving to the Windows Powered NAS," LaFontaine says.
The Windows Powered NAS will also help reduce the ratio of storage cost to storage use. Unlike an environment in which one server uses 100 percent of the direct-attached storage capacity and another uses only 20 percent, a Windows Powered NAS enables customers to distribute the storage efficiently so that the servers have access to the amount of storage they need without letting a lot of extra capacity go to waste. Agfa's customers can also recycle some of the remaining direct-attached systems by attaching them to the Windows Powered NAS as needed to increase storage capacity.
Evolving to Meet Changing Needs
The Windows Powered NAS solution scales to meet the wide range of price, performance, and capacity needs of Agfa's customer base and can expand externally with SCSI-Ultra ATA, SCSI-SCSI, or fibre-fibre RAID systems.
This system can also adapt easily to meet the changing needs of the market so that Agfa can upgrade processors, memory, and other hardware as the technology improves without having to upgrade the operating system. "Our initial solution is based on hardware that is compatible with the application servers in the Salient system," Jangro says. "If Agfa changes networking hardware, we can modify the Windows Powered NAS appliance configuration to match the change. If it changes its systemwide backup strategy, we can add agents for whatever solution it chooses. When a new technology is introduced, we can add it very simply without writing code, so it's a lot easier to adapt our product as Agfa's needs change."
