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A large manufacturing company is an existing Isilon customer with a cluster consisting of four NL400 nodes with 4TB drives. The cluster is using N+2:1 protection level and the file system shows that it is 60% utilized. Home directories and file shares comprise 75% of the existing content and the remainder is inactive deep archive. The company has 1,000 employees using Windows and Mac clients participating in a single Active Directory (AD) forest.
During a meeting with the CIO and Director of IT you discuss the company’s recent acquisition – an engineering firm that specializes in Computer Aided Design (CAD). The engineering firm has 400 UNIX workstations that produce technical drawings which are currently stored on another vendor’s SAN solution. The all UNIX environment uses NIS for authentication and name resolution. They do not currently use DNS or LDAP. The engineering company has an old storage system that has been experiencing problems and the CIO would like you to migrate the data onto the Isilon cluster. The CIO would like to eliminate all tape and recover the data onto disk.
The CIO is concerned about security of the company’s intellectual property, especially with the rapid adoption of mobile devices and external cloud content sharing services such as DropBox, Egnyte, and SugarSync. They would like to implement an alternative that provides external file sharing and mobile device synchronization while maintaining security control over the company’s data.
The Director of IT reports that users are storing non-work related content on the Isilon cluster. They would like to limit the amount of capacity that each user can consume in their home directory and want to ensure you provide the capability to easily visualize which users are over their allotment.The company’s Windows users currently leverage Windows Shadow Copy to recover files that have been accidentally deleted. The IT department wants to ensure that Mac and incoming UNIX clients have the same functionality.
The Director of IT also mentions that users are reporting slow response times when browsing their home directories and shared folders. They are concerned that Isilon cannot scale to support their combined requirements.
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The CIO approaches you with a new requirement. They would like to reuse the tape library that was previously used for archiving to now be used to back up some of their data.
What do you recommend to the Director of IT as the best architecture to achieve this goal?
