About Court of Claims of Ohio
The Court of Claims has the jurisdiction to hear and determine all civil actions filed against the State of Ohio and its agencies. The court also hears appeals from decisions made by the Attorney General on claims allowed under the Victims of Crime Act. It decides civil claims that typically involve contract disputes, property damage, personal injury, immunity of state officers and employees, discrimination, and wrongful imprisonment.
Challenge
The Court of Claims of Ohio was storing 1.4 terabytes of data on high-ticket Fibre Channel. "When we moved our court case records online, our storage needs exploded," said Michael Glenn, senior IT manager for the Court of Claims of Ohio. "The SAN volume was consuming 12 high-speed drives, and that's no trivial cost. Maintaining it was a major headache. It took 14 hours to backup the data, and if something went wrong we'd have to start the backup all over again."
Managing this vast storage volume was a huge undertaking. "We were on an infinite rotation of monthly tapes, and were running out of physical space to store them," said Glenn. "We had a huge volume of data to manage, yet only 6 percent of it had been touched in the past year. We had no way of separating the stale data out."
In addition to seeking a more sensible approach to data storage, the organization was determined to find ways to better serve end users while keeping IT costs in check. Even seemingly trivial tasks like installing printer drivers consumed a great deal of time and resources, detracting staff from higher value work.
Novell Solution
"All the storage management solutions we looked at were either really complicated or very expensive," said Glenn. "Some would have required that we move to a Microsoft file server, and that's where the conversation ended. I didn't want to cut our performance in half!"
The organization ultimately selected Dynamic Storage Technology, a component of Novell Open Enterprise Server, to automatically direct infrequently accessed data to less expensive storage devices. "With most storage management systems, you often experience incompatibilities in the file system. Dynamic Storage Technology from Novell is such an elegant solution. You don't even have to make allowances for software incompatibilities."
Using Dynamic Storage Technology, the court was able to offload stale data to a serial ATA RAID with four low cost hard drives. "We live and die by Novell storage solutions," said Glenn. "The Dynamic Storage Technology component of Novell Open Enterprise Server enabled us to easily move more than a terabyte of less frequently accessed data to inexpensive hardware, reducing our hardware costs alone by 60 percent. That's a huge payoff right there."
The Novell solution has freed up an entire SAN Fibre Channel chassis for other uses. The organization is now backing up only the critical data on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, with less frequently accessed data backed up annually. This has reduced annual tape consumption by over 90 percent.
The court frequently uses Novell iPrint and Novell iFolder® as well. "Before implementing iPrint, we had to manually set up printers at each user's desktop, which took up a lot of valuable time" said Glenn. "Today, our users can just click on a graphical map that displays all of our printers, select the one closest to them, and install it. Novell iPrint even configures the driver for them."
To streamline the administration of its workstations, the court uses Novell ZENworks®. "The imaging and remote control features of Novell ZENworks have been huge timesavers for us," said Glenn. "If a user has issues with their PC, we can just flip a switch to fix it or re-image the machine if necessary."
Results
By leveraging Dynamic Storage Technology to move the vast majority of its data to less expensive hardware, the Court of Claims of Ohio has effectively reduced storage management costs by $142,000 a year-money that can now be reallocated elsewhere in the organization.
"The move to Novell Open Enterprise Server has been seamless to our users," said Glenn. "Before implementing Dynamic Storage Technology, we basically had everything loaded on a Formula 1 race car. Essentially, we've been able to move the majority of our data to a Mack truck without users even noticing because they've experienced no difference in performance."
The benefits realized from Novell ZENworks have been equally impressive. "Without Novell ZENworks, we would have to add one or two additional IT people," said Glenn. "We estimate that Novell ZENworks saves us at least 33 percent in overall IT administration costs."