And nobody knows this better than Steve Collins, manager of IT services at Benchmark Energy Products LP, a supplier of chemicals to the oil industry.
It's his job to give Benchmark workers and clients the computer resources needed to make sure that the slurry - a gel that turns into an oatmeal-like sludge -- is available for "frac jobs," where the gel is pumped into an oil well under high pressure to fracture the ground to make the oil flow better.
Benchmark installed a US$60,000 storage-area network (SAN) from EqualLogic Inc. in Nashua, N.H., about a year ago to improve its disaster recovery and backup capabilities. The SAN replicates Benchmark's Biz-Net accounting software and Microsoft Exchange e-mail data.
Collins said the accounting system gets replicated every night from Benchmark Energy's Houston headquarters to its largest facility, in Midland, Texas, over the SAN's 3Mbit/sec. point-to-point connection.
The SAN provides 3TB of storage and supports 130 people across three sites. "The SAN has given me better control of our volumes and data," Collins said.
He said the bulk of the accounting and e-mail data was moved onto the SAN within two weeks of starting the project. Now the company is migrating data being created as it upgrades the BizNet software to work with Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software and Access database.
Benchmark last week moved to unify its backups by buying a Dell Inc. LTO-3 autoloader, based on the linear-tape open standard, that is consistent with the SAN. It performs tape backups using EMC Corp.'s Retrospect software.
Benchmark's clients include oil industry giants such as Halliburton Co. and Schlumberger Ltd.
"We're a midsize company, and it's hard to get to all the best practices we should be doing," Collins said. "We need a lot of bang for the buck because we're not able to throw a lot of people at a project." The SAN has become a key tool for meeting those requirements, he said.
Collins began evaluating backup and disaster recovery technologies more than a year ago, first an iSCSI SAN system from EqualLogic and then Fibre Channel and iSCSI technologies from EMC.
Collins said he was impressed with the ease of use of EqualLogic's SAN technology. "I was already pretty much sold on iSCSI," he said. "I always had a knock against Fibre Channel. It's not known for how easy it is to use."
As for EMC, Collins said, "they were pushing Fibre Channel, which was much more expensive." EMC also offered an iSCSI SAN, but Benchmark went with EqualLogic instead.
Roger Cox, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said that while EMC offers similar iSCSI SAN products, he believes that EqualLogic's is easier to use.