Navis
navis.com
Headquarters: Oakland, California
Industry: Transportation
Employees: 300
Oracle products and services: Pillar Axiom
600 systems, Storage Tek SL3000
modular library systems, Oracle Database,
Oracle Consulting
SNAPSHO TS
purchasing two Pillar Axiom 600 storage
systems and two Storage Tek SL3000
modular library systems. Navis is now
creating a virtual I T infrastructure to
improve the flexibility of its software-development activities.
“We have a very fluid and dynamic envi-
ronment, with a lot of buildup and teardown
in the engineering process,” says Stephen
Schleiger, manager of systems engineering
at Navis. “Being able to logically partition
the storage environment to support virtual
instances is the secret sauce of the Pillar
Axiom storage system. It has all of the com-
ponents we need to maintain exceptional
performance and reliability. It is a solid
platform that we can tailor to our individual
requirements. With 25 percent of the world’s
container moves handled using our software, having a stable data
management environment is essential to our customers.”
In addition to providing components that can be custom tailored
to fit an organization, the Pillar Axiom storage system responds to
the changing needs of applications.
“The Pillar Axiom storage system has patented technology that
adapts and prioritizes all the physical resources of the system to the
relative business priorities of the various application workloads it’s
supporting,” explains Oracle’s Bullinger. “By dynamically controlling
the priority of data in cache, the execution order of I/O activity, and the
tiered placement of data on rotating and solid-state disk drives, the
Pillar Axiom system can consolidate multiple applications and deliver
deterministic levels of performance and priority for each one while lin-
early scaling to meet growing capacity and performance requirements.”
create a tiered storage environment.
FamilySearch
familysearch.org
Headquarters: Salt Lake City, Utah
Industry: Research
Oracle products: Storage Tek SL8500
modular library systems, Storage Tek
T10000C tape drives, Sun Storage Archive
Manager, Storage Tek SL500 modular library
systems, SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers,
Oracle Database
SIZING UP THE OP TIONS
Schleiger first encountered the Pillar Axiom product line when Navis
decided to either upgrade or replace an existing storage solution.
“We looked at different vendors, but Pillar [Axiom] systems particu-
larly intrigued us,” he recalls. “In order to keep up with the demands
of our team, we knew we had to virtualize. We saw the Pillar Axiom
600 as the best solution for our software engineering operations.”
Navis determined that it would get more for its money with Pillar
Axiom, compared to competing products. “From a management stand-
point, the Pillar Axiom line is very easy to use,” Schleiger notes. “The
interface is intuitive. We realized we could come up to speed on the
Pillar Axiom faster than we could with any other storage platform.”
Working with Oracle Consulting, Navis is implementing the Pillar
Axiom 600 systems in its U. S. and India data centers as part of a
disaster recovery architecture that uses the Pillar Axiom MaxRep
Replication utility to bidirectionally replicate data between these
two locations. Net changes to specified volumes are automatically
captured via snapshots every 15 minutes and then replicated to the
Pillar Axiom 600 volumes in the alternate data center. Navis plans
to use Oracle’s storage archive management file system (SAM-FS) to
A COST-EFFEC TIVE ALTERNATIVE
FamilySearch came to the same conclusion when it sought a digital
preservation and archiving system for its massive genealogical service.
For more than 100 years, FamilySearch has been actively gathering,
preserving, and sharing genealogical records with people all over the
world—initially through thousands of family history centers in 70
countries, and later through a public Website where any Web visitor
can tap into a database that contains billions of genealogical records.
Millions of people use this online service each year to piece together
their family trees and learn more about their ancestors.
The online service provides access to an Oracle database that
contains linking information gathered from individuals building
their family trees. Currently 20 terabytes ( TB), it’s a small amount of
data when compared to the FamilySearch preservation sites, where
the organization maintains digital images of historic documents.
Digital camera crews throughout the world are constantly gathering
new data as they photograph vital records from historical archives,
churches, hospitals, and government bureaus. At one archival site,
FamilySearch has been storing images of historic documents on
microfilm since the 1930s and has amassed 3. 5 million rolls of film
containing 4 billion records.
“Microfilm is a very stable medium, but it is not very accessible,”
says Randy Stokes, group architect for engineering services, storage
Newly Awarded
Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance has earned the highest overall scores
in the six-year history of Storage Magazine’s Quality Awards for NAS, for
both enterprise and midrange NAS. The Quality Awards identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use.
The results are based on a survey that assesses products in initial product
quality, features, reliability, technical support, and sales force competence.
Learn more at
oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1505421.
