Repurpose Old Hardware with SAN Storage Controllers

Repurpose Old Hardware with SAN Storage Controllers

Apr 03, 2018


Your business has been growing over the past decade, and it wasn’t too long ago that you had a server rack installed. At the time one SAS Raid Array made sense because you were planning to virtualize everything.

Now, two hosts and an additional 100 employees later, you need more IOPS and more storage. What can you do with your SAS Raid Array? Throwing it out is not an option. Scenarios like these are common throughout the small and medium business landscape. While investing in your data infrastructure is always worthwhile, the costs can spiral out of control if you’re not careful and choosing the wrong solution can be even more costly down the road.

ATTO Technology has the ideal solution for situations like these. Recently the construction management company Torcon found a solution using an ATTO XstreamCORE™ FC 7550 SAN Storage Controller and Celerity™ 16Gb dual port Fibre Channel HBAs. Torcon had a collocated datacenter with three hosts running VMware using a single SAS Raid Array. In less than three hours the ATTO components were added to Torcon’s system, all without powering down virtual machines or bringing down the datacenter. Now, Torcon is enjoying better overall system performance and has far more expansion options without having to re-architect the core setup.

"It has provided a seamless migration path to newer all-flash vendor agnostic solutions and gave new life to hardware we would otherwise replace," said Shawn Winters, Torcon Director of Technology.

For the cost of a storage controller and some HBAs, any seemingly hardware-limited direct-attached environment can be converted into shared storage with nearly limitless expansion options. As ATTO proved with Torcon, it can be accomplished without having to rebuild the core system.

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