Read the case study titled, “Carlson Companies” found in attachment file

Write a fully developed paper (3-5 pages) in which you:

1. Assess how the Carlson SAN approach would be implemented in today’s environment. 
2. Compare the pros and cons of consolidating data on a SAN central data facility versus the dispersed arrangement it replaces. 
3. Evaluate the issues raised from the Carlson SAN mixing equipment from a number of vendors and determine the management options for dealing with this type of situation. 
4. Justify the reduction of administration and management of storage networking through Carlson’s IP SAN. 
5. Assess how cloud computing could be used by Carlson instead of a SAN. Create a diagram using Visio or its open source alternative software to illustrate the use of cloud computing. Note: The graphically depicted solution is not included in the required page length. 
6. Use at least five quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar websites do not qualify as quality resources.

computer scienceinformation system

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CARLSON COMPANIES STORAGE SOLUTIONS

Carlson Companies (www.carlson.com) is one of the largest privately held

companies in the United States, with more than 171,000 employees in more

than 150 countries. Carlson enterprises include a presence in marketing,

business and leisure travel, and hospitality industries. Its Carlson Hotels

Worldwide division owns and operates approximately 1,075 hotels located in

more than 70 countries. Radisson, Park Plaza, and Country Inn & Suites by

Carlson are some of its hotel brands. The hotel loyalty program is named

Club Carlson. The Carlson Restaurants Worldwide includes T.G.I. Friday’s

and the Pick Up Stix chains. The company registered approximately $38

billion in sales in 2011.

Carlson’s Information Technology (IT) division, Carlson Shared Services,

acts as a service provider to its internal clients and consequently must

support a spectrum of user applications and services. The IT division uses a

centralized data processing model to meet business operational

requirements. The central computing environment has traditionally included

an IBM mainframe and over 50 networked Hewlett-Packard and Sun servers

[KRAN04, CLAR02, HIGG02]. The mainframe supports a wide range of

applications, including Oracle financial database, e-mail, Microsoft Exchange,

Web, PeopleSoft, and a data warehouse application.

http://www.carlson.com/

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In 2002, the IT division established six goals for assuring that IT

services continued to meet the needs of a growing company with heavy

reliance on data and applications:

1. Implement an enterprise data warehouse.

2. Build a global network.

3. Move to enterprise-wide architecture.

4. Establish six-sigma quality for Carlson clients.

5. Facilitate outsourcing and exchange.

6. Leverage existing technology and resources.

The key to meeting these goals was to implement a storage area

network (SAN) with a consolidated, centralized database to support

mainframe and server applications. Carlson needed a SAN and data center

approach that provided a reliable, highly scalable facility to accommodate

the increasing demands of its users.

Storage Requirements
Prior to implementing the SAN and data center approach, the central DP

shop included separate disc storage for each server, plus that of the

mainframe. This dispersed data storage scheme had the advantage of

responsiveness; that is, the access time from a server to its data was

minimal. However, the data management cost was high. There had to be

backup procedures for the storage on each server, as well as management

controls to reconcile data distributed throughout the system. The mainframe

included an efficient disaster recovery plan to preserve data in the event of

major system crashes or other incidents and to get data back online with

little or no disruption to the users. No comparable plan existed for the many

servers.

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As Carlson’s databases grow beyond 10 terabytes (TB) of business-

critical data, the IT team determined that a comprehensive network storage

strategy would be required to manage future growth.

Solution Concept
The existing Carlson server complex made use of Fibre Channel links to

achieve communication and backup capabilities among servers. Carlson

considered extending this capability to a full-blown Fibre Channel SAN that

would encompass the servers, the mainframe, and massive centralized

storage facilities. The IT team concluded that further expansion using Fibre

Channel technologies alone would be difficult and costly to manage. At the

same time, in supporting the many offsite client systems that accessed data

center servers, the IT shop already had a substantial investment in IP

network products and staff training. Accordingly, Carlson sought a solution

that would leverage this IP investment, provide scalability as additional local

and remote services are added, and require minimal traffic engineering of

the storage transport network.

Thus, Carlson settled on a solution based on a core IP SAN that would

meet both data-center and wide-area storage requirements and seamlessly

integrate new storage technologies.

Carlson Data Center SAN
The core of the Carlson SAN was an IP-based scheme in which Gigabit

Ethernet switches carry IP traffic among servers and between servers and

the central storage. Attached to the Gigabit switches were Nishan IP storage

switches, which provided a Fibre Channel interface for the servers and

storage and an IP traffic switch into the Ethernet core (Figure C8.1). The

Ethernet switches had a considerable cost advantage over comparable Fibre

Channel switches and required lower-cost management and maintenance.

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For redundancy, servers were dual-homed to the IP storage switches,

which in turn connected to redundant Ethernet switches. The ratio of servers

to storage interconnect was determined by the throughput requirements of

each server group. Similarly, multiple IP storage switches connected the

Ethernet switch core to the SAN storage system. This configuration could be

scaled to support additional servers and storage arrays by adding additional

IP storage switches. The network core of Ethernet switches could also

expand by adding additional switches.

The focus of the Carlson SAN was a 13-TB HP StorageWorks Disc array.

A major consideration in planning the transition was the migration of data

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from the mainframe’s storage to the central storage. The mainframe hosts

several mission-critical applications in a round-the-clock fashion. Thus, an

offline data migration was not feasible. The migration of all common data to

this array proceeded in two phases. In the first phase, each server was

taken offline and a simple copy was performed to transfer the application

data on the server systems to the new storage system. The second phase

involved the transfer of 1.2 TB of data from the mainframe’s legacy storage

to the new storage system. Carlson contracted this task out to HP storage

experts who made use of proprietary data migration and network

management tools to enable the transfer to occur during production

processing hours. End users were unaffected during the migration.

Carlson’s IP SAN helped reduce the ongoing administration and

management of storage networking by taking advantage of well-established

and well-understood IP networking technologies. In addition, putting storage

data over IP facilitated integration of more efficient storage services for

Carlson’s enterprise-wide network including centralized backup of remote

sites to the data center SAN.

Carlson’s Shared Storage Model
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has developed

several frameworks to technologists and business managers understand the

relationship among host applications, storage networks, and storage

facilities. One of these is called the Shared Storage Model (SSM). The SSM

provides guidance for designing storage networks within the context of the

upper layer applications that rely on storage resources and the storage

architectures that are available to satisfy them.

Like the OSI network model, the SSM is divided into layers and has an

application layer at the topmost level. Immediately beneath the application

layer is the file/record layer; this includes file system and database system

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components. The block aggregation layer is located beneath the file/record

layer; this includes host, network, and device sublayers. The storage device

layer is beneath the block/aggregation level and the block layer is lowest

level in the framework – it is here that issues like space

management/compression, striping, and redundancy are specified.

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The usefulness of SSM for understanding storage architectures was

embraced by Carlson’s network designers [SEAR12]. It helped them clarify

the relationship between application resources and storage resources and

opportunities to further streamline storage administration to enable more

efficient use of storage capacity. This led to the storage network design

illustrated in Figure C8.2.

In the new storage network architecture features a single SAN-attached

storage array with a capacity in excess of 10 terabytes that is shared by

Carlson custom and Oracle applications. This resource offers more

economical maintenance and easier administration than the storage arrays

that were replaced. Shared directories and data for other internal

applications migrated to NAS filer systems which could provide cross-

platform support as well as remote NAS service for Carlson users.

Remote storage access is beneficial to organizations like Carlson that

want to unite geographically dispersed sites within a global IT strategy. Such

a scheme helps safeguard business continuity by enabling backups for

remote sites to be carried out within the central data center. Carlson uses

software that enables block change backups to be performed. This means

that on the data that has changed since the last backup is sent from the

remote site to the central data center’s backup facility; this reduces the

amount of data that must be sent across the WAN.

The SSM offers Carlson a coherent framework for analyzing current and

future data requirements at both its remote sites and the data center. It also

helps the company’s IT managers visualize the connection between its

storage network architecture and overall IT goals.

Discussion Points
1. Discuss how Carlson’s storage solutions address the IT goals the

company is trying to achieve.

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2. Discuss the pros and cons of consolidating data in central data center
facilities versus the distributed data storage arrangement it replaced.

3. Do some Internet research to identify other organizations that have
benefitted from Storage Network Industry Association’s Shared
Storage Model. What patterns of benefits can be observed?

Sources
[CLAR02] Clark, E. “Carlson Companies Trades up to an IP SAN.” Network
Magazine, December, 2002.

[HIGG02] Higgins, K. “T.G.I. Friday’s Owner Serves up an IP SAN.”
Network Computing, September 15, 2002.

[KRAN04] Kranz, G. “Strategic Storage: Eyeing IP Storage.”
Searchstorage.com, November 9, 2004.

[SEAR12] SearchStorageChannel. “SNIA Shared Storage Model: Practical
Implications.” TechTarget.com. Retrieved online at:
http://storagesearchchannel.techtarget.com/feature/SNIA-Shared-Storage-
Model-Practical-applications.

http://storagesearchchannel.techtarget.com/feature/SNIA-Shared-Storage-Model-Practical-applications

http://storagesearchchannel.techtarget.com/feature/SNIA-Shared-Storage-Model-Practical-applications

CASE STUDY 8
Storage Requirements
Solution Concept
Carlson Data Center SAN
Carlson’s Shared Storage Model
Discussion Points
Sources