The City of New York

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The City of New York Department of Housing
Preservation and Development
Storage Trends at HPD
SHAUN DONOVAN, Commissioner   CARY B. PESKIN,
Associate Commissioner / Chief Information
Officer
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HPDs Mission Using a variety of preservation,
development and enforcement strategies, HPD
strives to improve the availability,
affordability and quality of housing in New York
City. As the nation's largest municipal housing
agency, HPD works with private, public and
community partners to strengthen neighborhoods
and enable more New Yorkers to become homeowners
or to rent well-maintained, affordable housing.
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Storage Chronology
2000 - 2001 Traditional silo environment
comprised of a cluster of servers 2002 Need for
consolidation 2003 Introduction of EMC
Symmetrix SAN/NAS EMC SAN supporting Oracle and
Exchange Celerra NAS supporting local storage
needs Introduction of Centera CAS, a low cost,
effective form of storage 2005 Upgrade from
Symmetrix to DMX1000 for improved performance and
reliability 2006 2007 Currently using DoITT
as a DR site. Centera replication already in
progress. Celera and DMX replication to follow
in FY07/FY08.
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2000 - 2001 Traditional silo environment
comprised of a cluster of servers HPD launched
its enterprise-wide application, HPDInfo, in 1999
which started the trend for faster, larger and
more reliable storage.
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2002 A need for consolidation Over the years
data collection increased. Calls from HPDs
Central Complaint Bureau (311) were climbing
quickly and exceeded 500,000 calls per year with
one-day spikes at more than 8,000 calls. With
data center maintenance and ever-increasing data
storage requirements it became apparent that a
shift from stand alone servers to a
state-of-the-art large-scale Storage Area Network
(SAN) was needed.
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2003 The introduction of a SAN/NAS HPD
evaluated a number of different storage solutions
and selected a multi-terabyte configuration from
EMC. The SAN storage was configured to support
our Oracle and Exchange environments. Since HPD
does not permit access to the C drive for the
majority of users, the Celerra NAS was configured
to provide local storage for its 2,500 users.
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2004 The introduction of Centera Content
Addressable Storage (CAS) A Filenet document
imaging system was introduced for scanned
materials as well as the everyday use of digital
cameras for recording building conditions.
Adding to the demand for storage was HPDs GIS
environment with its storage demands and ortho
imagery. In response a low cost, effective form
of storage was introduced. EMC uses a
proprietary interface for its CAS which is built
on very inexpensive yet reliable IDE storage
technology.
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2005 The need for improved performance and
reliability HPDs data and performance demands
kept increasing with the additions of Internet
based applications and a growing number of
users. To keep pace with demand, HPD upgraded
its server environment to 64 bit server
technology running Windows 2000/3 Enterprise and
upgraded its SAN to an EMC DMX1000. The DMX1000
provides a significant increase in performance,
reliability and capacity and set the stage for
our disaster recovery strategy.
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2006 - 2007 Disaster Recovery (DR) A storage
network solution built around an EMC DMX1000
provides a mirrored SAN and NAS resource. An EMC
Centera provides a CAS resource for images linked
to the Agencys main business application. In
all, seven and a half terabytes is
supported. All data assets, except static, are
protected by daily, weekly, and monthly polices
for automated backup to a tape library. For the
static data, a secondary Centera is maintained at
HPDs new DR site at 11 Metrotech, and is
synchronized with the primary Centera throughout
the day. The replication link is through the
DoITT CityNet. DMX1000 and Celera replication
will follow over the next year.
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Thank you
Contact Information Cary B. Peskin Associate
Commissioner/CIO 212 863-6140 peskinc_at_hpd.nyc.gov