vSERV Testimonials

	vSERV Testimonials

	File Server Aggregation Increases User Productivity and Reduces IT Management Costs Limelight Technologies, an IT consulting firm in Ft. Collins, CO provides IT consulting, custom development, and system integration services to a variety of industries. Limelight is a 20-person company that uses networked file storage to store and share source code, documentation, project proposals and general-purpose office documents for its projects. This document chronicles the use and need for file aggregation in Limelight's environment and how CSA's vSERV file aggregation product made a positive impact on the Limelight environment. For the last 12 months Limelight has been using two file servers to deliver networked file storage space to their users. Prior to that, Limelight had only one file server. When Server1 ran out of space a second server was added. The storage capacity of Server1 is 53GB. Seventy four gigabytes of storage is available on Server2. At the time of the trial, Server1 and Server2 had 3GB and 1GB of available storage respectively. In addition, since the current two-server environment was created as a result of the first server running out of capacity, project files for Limelight clients were spread across both servers. Both servers had a Projects folder and the files for any given project were stored on one or the other server. Users, when looking for a particular file, had to either remember the server storing the file or search both servers. This had a significant negative impact on user productivity. Limelight installed vSERV from CSA on both Server1 and Server2. vSERV, which makes multiple file servers look and behave like a single server, tied these two servers together. File aggregation, as this blending of servers is called, enables users to interact with one file system, makes all the servers in the pool look like one single server, and gives IT one pool of storage to manage. In the aggregated environment, users see a single server with 127GB of capacity and 4GB of free space. The directory structures have been combined thanks to vSERV. Now, when looking for a file pertaining to a project, users only need look in one Projects folder. Gone are the days of looking through multiple servers to find a file. Ease of finding data, however, was only one of Limelight's issues. Lack of available storage capacity clearly was another. Without aggregation Limelight would have purchased a third server and created yet another file server and Projects folder for its users. With aggregation, however, the new server has been added to the aggregated pool and users do not need to change their behavior at all. Users see new amounts of available storage, but new data can be written into existing directory structures. IT was able to increase the amount of available storage and give users the immediate benefit of increased capacity without reconfiguring clients or migrating existing data to new server hardware. In addition to the benefits described Limelight has seen another advantage for its organization: Users now have greater levels of confidence in their file server environment since they know they can access all available storage and their data is easier to find. As a result, users are using the file servers even more than before, increasing the flow of information within teams, thereby increasing their productivity. © Copyright 2003 Colorado Software Architects, Inc.