SCIENCE

SANTA CLARA, CA -- Hitachi Data Systems and McDATA Corporation today announced that they have designed and installed a Storage Area Network (SAN) to house and manage the fast-growing volumes of data generated by the energy-trading operations at Xcel Energy Corporation's data center in Denver. Xcel Energy's Energy Markets business unit does wholesale trading of natural gas and electricity all across North America. It must react to market conditions minute by minute during the trading day and dispatch energy to its trading partners 24 hours a day, every day. These transactions, as well as the need to store lengthy contracts, make its business very data intensive and underlie its requirements for storage that is highly reliable, able to handle huge numbers of transactions without impacting performance, and scalable across a wide range of capacities. To meet all these requirements Xcel Energy decided to implement a SAN solution based on Hitachi Data Systems' Hitachi Freedom Storage(TM) Lightning 9900(TM) system and McDATA's ED 5000 Director. The SAN operates in a combined Windows NT and Sun Solaris(R) computing environment. Matthew Zafuto, director of Information Systems and Technology for Xcel Energy's Energy Markets Business Unit in Denver, led the SAN selection and implementation teams. In the past year, he has seen an exponential increase in the storage capacity needed to support trading operations and is currently deploying about 1.2 terabytes (TB). He expects that capacity easily to triple by the end of the year and perhaps to grow much more than that. "The core business problem we're trying to solve is to put in place a data storage infrastructure that will enable us to maintain an exponential growth rate," he said. "The solution has to allow us to add storage capacity on a vast scale and it also has to be highly reliable in order to assure access to the data." Xcel Energy concluded that its existing infrastructure, which was based on multiple servers with directly attached storage, would not allow the company to scale its storage capacity easily and economically. Zafuto's team didn't want to rely on "throwing more servers at the problem" in order to gain storage capacity whenever they wanted to install new applications or accommodate more users. "There may be cases where we do need additional server capacity, but largely our business is dealing with data and the use of data, so we wanted to meet the data requirements just by adding more storage capacity whenever we needed it," he said. "A SAN lends itself to doing that." To give his users confidence that a SAN would meet their needs for performance and reliability, Zafuto believed it was important to select components based on leading-edge technology that was well-proven in the marketplace. "The internal architecture of the 9900 was vastly superior to the others we evaluated," said Zafuto. The 9900's unique internal switch architecture and its use of Fibre Channel technology removes the performance bottlenecks that can slow down data throughput in conventional storage systems. The 9900 can scale up to 37 TB in a single system without experiencing any deterioration in performance. "McDATA's architecture is extremely capable of meeting our needs for manageability and reliability," said Zafuto. "Their switches are easy to tune and configure for a variety of system conditions, and their ability to participate in a 'call home' network along with the storage systems lets us know if any potential problems have been detected. That makes them a very reliable offering for us." The opportunity to visit McDATA's nearby interoperability laboratory played a key role in Xcel Energy's decision to select the Hitachi/McDATA solution. "The ability to actually view the Lightning 9900 frame that we ultimately purchased, along with the switches we purchased, all in an environment largely similar to our own, provided a great deal of value and comfort to us," said Zafuto. Looking to the future, Zafuto expects to attach data marts and data warehouses to Xcel Energy's SAN -- another reason it was so important to choose a highly scalable storage solution for the company's initial foray into SAN technology. These data-mining applications will extend the value of the SAN by helping users to make better business decisions, but they will also add a further dimension to the company's need to house the explosively growing masses of data it generates. For more information visit www.hds.com