Case Study: Continental Airlines
By deploying Compaq TaskSmart N2400 Network Attached Storage appliances powered by Windows®, Continental Airlines was able to double its network storage space while reducing the number of servers by more than 70 percent. This solution offered significantly lower acquisition costs than did other considered solutions while delivering high system availability and reducing management costs.
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Company Overview
Even before the events of September 11 in New York and Washington D.C, tight competition among airlines created a constant challenge to reduce costs to remain profitable. One area where Continental Airlines has found that it can reduce costs without affecting the quality of its service is in information technology (IT) systems. The company recently discovered tremendous savings in both hardware and IT management costs by consolidating its configuration of 14 traditional file servers into four Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances powered by Windows.
Business Challenge
Most user and group files for Continental's 4,000 corporate users are stored on the network, so availability is critical to ensuring an efficient operation. Continental's IT group had previously set up 14 file servers running either the Microsoft Windows NT® Server 4.0 or Windows 2000 Server operating system. However, as the number of servers grew and performance slowed, the IT group decided that a system tuned specifically for file sharing would improve speed and capacity for users while reducing the number of servers required.
"The need for storage just grows and grows," explains Eric Craig, Continental's Director of Network and Systems Engineering. "We needed to add a lot of file space to the network, but in addition to just increasing capacity, we wanted to consolidate file servers, simplify our management burden, and increase the performance of network file access."
Solution
Continental looked at various NAS solutions, including Network Appliance, EMC Celerra Highroad, and the Compaq TaskSmart N2400 NAS appliance powered by Windows. The company decided on the Compaq solution powered by Windows for several reasons. Server appliances powered by Windows provide both reliability and the option to use clustering to further enhance this reliability and virtually eliminate downtime. The solution also offers an attractive entry price and integrates seamlessly into Continental's corporate IT environment and Active Directory infrastructure™which in turn eases deployment and helps to lower administrative overhead. And, because Windows can scale up to large-capacity servers, it enabled Continental to consolidate their servers to four.
"With Network Attached Storage appliances powered by Windows, we were able to add a great deal of storage to the network for a very small footprint and at a very reasonable price," Craig notes. "Now, by combining the NAS appliances with clustering and with storage area networking, we can add more space to the network even more cost-effectively."
When Continental began to look at NAS solutions, it did a high-level evaluation of EMC Celerra Highroad and Network Appliance. While both provided the capacity that Continental was looking for, they both would have required the airline to implement an extensive infrastructure to support a NAS solution. During the evaluation, Craig discovered that Compaq was beta-testing a new NAS solution that it had been working on with Microsoft.
The solution the Compaq TaskSmart N2400 server™ provides from 72 gigabytes to 2 terabytes of usable storage space and runs on an optimized version of Windows 2000 with the Server Appliance Kit specifically tuned for file system performance. Finding that the Compaq server met the company's key criteria for capacity, reliability, and speed, Continental agreed to beta-test it.
Continental installed the first Compaq NAS appliance powered by Windows for its home directories, which store individual user files and data. All users' My Documents folders are redirected to the network, which is their home directory and resides on the NAS server. When the solution is fully deployed, it will include two home directory servers and two servers that store departmental or group files used for collaborative projects, such as budgeting. The servers connect to a Compaq SAN with Compaq HSG 80 storage controllers.
Each user is reserved 500 megabytes (MB) of space on the home directory servers, and Craig ultimately expects to have approximately 2,000 users on each server. Users are responsible for maintaining their own data and will be notified if they exceed their allotted space limit. The system administrator handles general system maintenance, such as monitoring for viruses or other types of files that don't belong on the NAS.
By implementing the Compaq NAS appliances powered by Windows, Continental expects to provide optimum system availability for its users while gaining significant acquisition and administration cost savings.
"The primary benefit of this solution is that we can add a lot of file space to the network at a relatively low price point," Craig says. "Plus, the increased reliability of Windows 2000, combined with its clustering capability, will enable us to avoid outages for scheduled maintenance and will help lower our operational costs."
Business Benefits
Round-the-clock availability. The ability to consolidate all of its network storage on four servers provides Continental with definite cost benefits in both hardware and management costs. However, it makes reliability even more critical.
"With several servers, if one went down you had a few hundred people mad at you," Craig observes. "Now, if one of our four NAS servers goes down, it means a few thousand people can't get at their data, so reliability is crucial."
When all four NAS servers are deployed, Continental will use clustering to add even more reliability. The two home directory servers will form a cluster, as will the two group servers. Each cluster will consist of two physical servers and two virtual servers. "Clustering these servers will help us avoid outages even from scheduled maintenance activities," Craig notes.
More storage for the money. Craig estimates that storage requirements for traditional user data at Continental headquarters grow by 21 percent per year, so the primary goals of adding Network Attached Storage were to increase file space on the network and reduce the overall cost and complexity of the environment. With the Compaq NAS appliance powered by Windows, Continental was able to double its storage at a very affordable price. "By combining the NAS servers with Compaq storage area networking, we'll be able to add more space to the network at an even lower price," Craig says. "When we need more storage, we'll just add disks to the SAN."
And while this solution provides significantly more storage, it also enables Continental to consolidate servers. That means fewer servers to purchase and fewer to support and manage, while gaining impressive CIFS (Common Internet File Services) performance.
Lower administrative costs. "The beauty of having these NAS boxes running on Windows 2000 is that, from an administrative point of view, I didn't have to learn or teach my staff anything new," Craig notes. "They manage the NAS servers just as they would any other Windows 2000 Server-based system, and we're able to enforce policies using the vanilla Windows 2000 group policies." The Web-based user interface, provided with the appliance, makes it easy to manage the device from any remote workstation.
Another example of the administrative value of using the Compaq and Microsoft Windows 2000-based solution is the simplified backup process. Rather than invest in a backup application that backs up each desktop computer separately and requires extensive licensing costs and network overhead, Continental is able to back up all the user and departmental file data in the organization at once. This method ensures that the data is backed up consistently and reduces the time and licensing costs required to accomplish that. Storing all the files on NAS servers also enables users to move from PC to PC and still be able to access their documents.
Conclusion
By choosing the Compaq NAS appliance powered by Windows for its corporate headquarters, Continental Airlines was able to add significant network storage space at a very affordable price. The highly reliable, highly available solution provides users with access to their files at any time, from anywhere. And it provides administrators with a simpler system to manage, back up, and support.
