California-Based Security Specialist – Name Not Revealed – Chooses Qsan XS5216D System

“QSAN devices were an order of magnitude less costly than EMC storage and are very reliable, which is essential for corporate headquarters, city halls, and police departments with their jail cells,” said by the director of technology. “Whether it’s for the high I/O capability needed to support VMware storage or long-term retention of video footage, we recommend to our customers the same QSAN solutions that we use.“

Company Biography
The California-based security firm was founded in 2000 with a simple business plan to “bridge the gap between physical security and IT“, and specializes in integrated security management systems that are technologically innovative. With over 80 employees, the security firm deploys solutions for federal, state, and local governments, from national agencies to counties and municipalities down to their police stations. It also serves private sector firms in all major verticals.

Challenge
Physical security has evolved over the years, going from traditional locks and keys to such sophisticated systems as biometrics and facial recognition. Video surveillance, for example, went from analog, coaxial systems that recorded to tape to network-based video recorders that digitally store surveillance footage for extended periods.

“Today, physical security demands integration with IT systems,” said the director of technology, “Whereas maintenance departments used to be responsible for physical security, there are more IT-centric solutions operated by IT staff.“

As a result, the security firm’s success depends on developing, testing, and integrating software for its customers. Federal agencies, for example, want their users to deploy the same physical credentials to access both buildings and their computers. The company thus needs to consolidate the interfaces for disparate video systems, access control systems, and alarm systems. To this end, it maintains a VMware production environment with the storage performance to support over 100 VMs. Moreover, it needs to store video surveillance of its own facilities.

The security firm long relied on its legacy storage array to meet its production needs, but the solution was nearing its end-of-life. Moreover, while it was fine for storing video footage, the growing need for VMs required additional performance.

Solution:  Large Scale Surveillance

The security firm replaced its aged storage array with a QSAN XS5216D system, gaining 10Gb/s ports over 1Gb/s ports and support for flash drives. It installed 121.9TB SAS disks for 17TB of fast flash storage that are configured for RAID 5EE, allowing data protection and faster rebuilding of drives should one fail.

The XS5216D is designed to withstand multiple component failures and achieve 99.999% availability. It features dual-active controllers that double the available host bandwidth and cache hit ratio, ensuring maximum throughput and utilization of system resources.

On its flash drives, the XS5216D hosts 116 VMs, business apps like Exchange email, file servers, SQL servers, and the exacqVision video management system. Video surveillance is centrally stored on 11TB of HDDs on the QSAN device. The footage is from over 30 cameras at its HQ as well as surveillance from the firm’s other sites that arrive via VPNs.

Benefits
The flexible 3U, 16-bay XS5216D storage system enabled this security firm to use a faster pool of flash drives to support its VMs as well as a slower pool of spinning disks for video surveillance footage. Thanks to fast SSDs, this company improved throughput and eliminated bottlenecks, enabling more servers to be supported.

“Our developers appreciate the much greater performance of the QSAN platform and we’re also leveraging the lowest cost per gigabyte on the market,” said by the director. “The QSAN solution delivers the best ratio between price and performance.”

• Recommended Product: XCubeSAN 5200
• Recommended Models: XS5216
• Recommended Features: HA and virtualization