Wells Fargo Blazes A Path To IP Storage

Storage technology has made great advances in recent years, and many businesses now use storage appliances, networks, and management software to make better use of their storage resources. The next big move will be the long-awaited shift to IP-based storage so businesses can consolidate all data traffic on a single network. In some cases, customers are leading the way.

Wells Fargo Corp., a major financial-services company, used to spend 12 hours a day backing up 19 servers in a single department. That was unacceptable in an era of 24-hour banking. The task of improving the backup process fell to Erik Ott, an assistant VP, who knew the bank didn't want to spend a lot of money on a high-speed Fibre Channel storage area network.

Ott found a low-cost approach by combining products from two vendors, and now those vendors are offering the combination as a commercial package. Ott discovered Galaxy backup-and-recovery software from CommVault Systems at a conference. Then he added an IP storage appliance from StoneFly Networks Inc., an established vendor that used iSCSI, a protocol for transferring data from a server to storage over an IP network.

The combination cut the backup process from 12 hours to four. "It runs like a dream," Ott says.

When StoneFly saw what Ott had done, it talked to CommVault about developing a simpler and cheaper version of its software that the two vendors could sell with StoneFly's hardware to small and midsize businesses. IP storage systems that use the iSCSI protocol should appeal to these businesses because they already operate IP networks and have few IT staffers available to manage more complicated storage networks, StoneFly executives say.

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