The company began upgrading its storage networking and disaster recovery capabilities last spring.
Early in the project, the Louisville, Ky.-based long-term medical care provider replaced McData Corp. directors and switches with two storage-area networks (SAN), said Tim Hesson, director of storage management.
The new system uses four MDS 9509 Multilayer Director Switches (MDS) from Cisco Systems Inc. and provides 800 ports, he said. The consolidation freed up 100 switch ports that had simply linked all the switches in the McData network, Hesson noted.
Kindred plans to expand its use of the MDS switch's iSCSI capabilities for Ethernet connectivity to eventually consolidate backup on some of its 1,500 Windows-based servers.
"We've always tried to take a look around the corner," Hesson said. "If we are going to spend this money, is there any possibility to do something different or to better improve the infrastructure tomorrow, even if we can't leverage it today?" He didn't disclose a cost for the overall project.
Dual disaster recovery
Hesson said the company's storage team later this year will install a dual-network remote disaster-recovery SAN based on two modular Cisco 9216i Multilayer Fabric Switches.
The company's current disaster-recovery plan includes the shipping of backup tapes to a facility operated by Wayne, Pa.-based SunGard Data Systems Inc. The plan calls for server rebuilds only in emergencies.
Greg Schulz, an analyst at research firm StorageIO in Stillwater, Minn., said Kindred's SAN consolidation project is an example of a best practice that could work well for almost any large enterprise.
"Generally speaking, it's about taking directors or large port-count switches and using those to replace many smaller ones," he said.
Kindred is an all-EMC storage shop, and over the past year it has installed about 225TB of capacity on multiple high-end Symmetrix DMX arrays, a large number of midrange Clariion arrays and one Celerra network-attached storage array. The company plans to install an EMC Centera content-addressed storage array this month.