Implementing a Strategic File Area Network: Insights from Leon Verriere, Infrastructure Consultant at Mohawk Industries

As File Area Networks (FANs) begin to emerge in corporate enterprises, Mohawk Industries has been at the forefront of this trend. During a recent roundtable discussion, Mohawk Industries Infrastructure Consultant, Leon Verriere, described how his organization is implementing a strategic FAN for simplifying and improving file data management enterprise-wide.

Question: When you began implementing a FAN, was it difficult to think in terms of file management?

Leon Verriere: I would not say that it was even very difficult. Once you understand the basic concept of the FAN, you can leverage the technology you currently have in-house and consider plugging in the file services that you may be looking at. It just will make everything a whole lot easier once you have that overarching umbrella of the FAN approach.

Question: How important was it to attach a long-term ROI to your environment?

Leon Verriere: I am not sure that you can actually touch on the ROI enough. File management has been neglected for so many years because there has not been a strategic initiative. That was a key point for Mohawk in our implementation---that we could demonstrate ROI for what we wanted to do. Also, we wanted to be able to plug in different types of services to solve problems without worrying about how one type of solution might collide with another. A FAN provides a complete approach.

Question: One FAN detail that is probably worth calling out is the Global Namespace, where you are talking about a true heterogeneous file system. How important is the ability to centrally manage data?

Leon Verriere: At Mohawk, there would be no way that I could survive with the few resources that I have if I did not think in terms of efficiency. I mean, we are constantly challenged to do more with less, and the only way to do that is to standardize and make things easier to manage. We actually have hundreds of locations that I have to manage file data for, so there are a large number of file data management challenges. From our perspective, we really want to protect all of the company's data, even down to the data that sits in a user's "My Documents" folder. And we found a way to do that using the FAN methodology.

Our difficulty comes in managing multiple file systems that I have across multiple locations and there is always an ongoing data migration. There is a constant charge to remove hardware and have it replaced with bigger, better hardware and more storage. So the constant moving of these files is a gigantic headache. Just in the time that we have had this FAN methodology in place, we have done a Novell-to-Windows migration. We have acquired four companies in that timeframe, and we have also done a rollout of Windows Storage Servers to over 275 of our locations.

Question: How big is your team that has responsibility for dealing with file management issues?

Leon Verriere: I have three people for that. My team as a whole is actually eight, but that includes staff for our next big challenge, which was handling remote site tape backups. For years and years, you deployed a server in a remote facility, put a tape device out there, and then you got some person who has never done IT in his or her life to change the tapes so that you can restore files if anything ever goes wrong. We needed a way to centralize and standardize that process.

Question: It sounds like you had developed different file serving strategies over many years. At some point, did you look at this and say, "If we do not unify this in some way, we cannot scale?"

Leon Verriere: That's correct. We purchased a file virtualization and management solution to implement in our environment. And with the systems from Microsoft already in place we determined that this solution would be able to eliminate our dependence on physical file locations. We use the term virtualization because the Global Namespace provides the virtualization for us. We use the Global Namespace for applications. We use it for user data, paths to their "My Documents" folders. Users have no idea where their files are physically located because they are going through a Global Namespace to access their files. There are no server-specific names or anything in any of the file paths.

Question: Did you implement this completely based on business logic?

Leon Verriere: Yes. One of the immediate implications of having this namespace is that you could, for the first time on an enterprise-wide basis, remove the device-level dependency. It is in an abstracted logical group. Also with the solution, we have been able to simplify and automate our migrations and consolidations. Now, when we have to deploy any file server to a location, we consolidate data from multiple servers to a single server, and our FAN solution enables us to do that. In the four acquisitions that I mentioned, we have used the file consolidation piece in order to eliminate servers and implement a Global Namespace in all of those locations.

Question: Was it easy to transform your environment in a non-disruptive way?

Leon Verriere: Yes. I can give you a very quick illustration. We have a file server at our El Paso Ceramic Tile Manufacturing Plant and they are starting to hit the ceiling on the amount of storage they have in their server. Rather than ship drives in order to upgrade the amount of storage they have, what we will do is take a new server, put upgraded drives in it, take the data - it is a very quick, point-and-click process - and indicate that we want that data to be what is on the current El Paso server.

It is non-intrusive. The users have no idea that it is happening. I ship the server to the location, have them plug it in, and then I do a very quick sync of the data. Basically, I can point them to the new box and the users never know the difference. It really is that simple.

Question: What has been the impact of the FAN on your disaster recovery program?

Leon Verriere: We actually built our disaster recovery plans for all of our file and print devices around the ability to centrally manage data. If I have a file server that fails out in the field, then I have one that is sitting on standby in my data center that I can copy the data to. At the same time I can redirect my users from the failed location to where the replicated location is back in my data center. So they have complete access to their files at that point.

Question: You can set up standby or failover warm servers for any failed file service over multiple geographies, do the failover, redirect the business users and then switch back?

Leon Verriere: Right, and then our FAN solution will actually handle the synchronization of the data as well. That is done from a single console. From a backup perspective, we have a great deal of leverage. In fact, that is where most of our dollar savings came from. What we began doing is using our FAN solution to replicate all of the data from all of those devices back to our primary data center. Now we have a full disaster recovery copy of all of our remote facilities. So we could lose any one of the file servers that we have in the enterprise and we have a full backup of the data from the previous night.

Question: When you were thinking about a formalized FAN deployment, what ended up being the key ROI justifications as you sold this up within your organization?

Leon Verriere: It was about eliminating the tape backup infrastructure and putting a dollar value on the fact that people are not changing tapes. I could convince my CIO how important file data was, especially in those edge locations. So, by representing the whole tape backup scenario, that is really where the large amount of ROI came out.

There is so much flexibility as far as what we are doing. I do not have to buy tapes or tape devices. If you are managing six to eight terabytes of data that are in 300-plus locations, you would probably need quite a few more people. We have a massively efficient organization right now. The CAPEX and the OPEX savings is an easy way to get the senior management team to buy into it. But there is also a cascade of cost savings from the management efficiencies of technologies like this. It adds up to be even more significant than the CAPEX/OPEX savings in the long run.