Cornerstone Optimizes Virtual Infrastructure

Cornerstone Fellowship Church, a community church based in Livermore, Calif., with a congregation of more than 5,500 people, has implemented the Pillar Axiom unified storage system to consolidate storage for Microsoft SQL databases and applications in a newly virtualized environment.

To ease the migration to VMware vSphere 4 and take advantage of VMware vMotion for continuous service availability, Cornerstone Fellowship Church sought a reliable, easy-to-manage SAN that would enable maintaining performance while keeping up with growing storage demands, including an expansion into video storage.

In assessing the storage landscape, Cornerstone found that traditional storage architectures lacked the flexibility, resiliency and scalability to meet the demands of the organization’s virtualized infrastructure and were overly complex to manage and support.

In contrast, Pillar’s QoS were  suited for Cornerstone’s virtualized environment while delivering capacity utilization.

According to Cornerstone Fellowship Church, carving out and prioritizing storage on Pillar’s Axiom platform with 20 TBs of storage is effortless; a two-person team manages top-priority storage for its virtual machines and mission-critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange, while accommodating lower-priority yet data-intensive archives of high-definition video and security camera footage.

Reliable, Scalable Pillar Lowers Virtual Storage Complexity:

• Cornerstone Fellowship Church reports that Pillar’s simplified management has eliminated the complexity of moving to a virtualized environment while offering an extensible growth path for the future.
• Pillar’s heightened reliability and multiple levels of redundancy enable Cornerstone Church to leverage a common storage pool without introducing a single point of failure into the environment.
• The flexibility to add capacity, change application priorities and improve performance as needs dictate without major upgrades or additional licensing costs produces a sound, long-term investment.
• The ability to deploy denser servers without worry over storage resource contention while supporting ever-increasing video, kiosk and computer lab requirements has enabled Cornerstone Church to reduce its server count for a projected a capital cost reduction of $80,000 over five years.

Ray Bunch, IT Manager for Cornerstone Fellowship Church, said:
"The Axiom is a ‘fire-and-forget’ solution that tells me if anything goes wrong. I know organizations where someone’s entire job is making the tweaks and fixes that Pillar Axiom does all on its own. I love that I don’t ever have to worry about it."

"With Axiom’s modular architecture and QoS, we have the flexibility to add capacity, change application priorities and improve performance as our needs change and grow. Next year, I plan to expand our security camera system, which means I’ll simply add another storage brick to address the increased storage demand."

"We really appreciate the partnership approach Pillar takes, which is very real to us. We’re impressed by the tech team’s ability to troubleshoot issues and get down to a level of support that’s not really expected but very appreciated."

"Now that we’ve had the Pillar in production for several years, we’ve been able to prove our assumptions that the SAN requires little manpower and performs well no matter what we throw at it," concludes Bunch. "Pillar Axiom represents a sound, long-term investment for Cornerstone Church, especially in enabling us to continually build out our virtualized infrastructure while doing that much more for our organization."