ePropertyTax, a Leading Real Property Tax ASP Implements IP SAN Using Alacritech iSCSI Accelerators; iSCSI SAN Increases Database Performance and Speeds Transaction Processing Ensuring Reliability and Scalability for Growing Number of Property Taxpayers

• Industry/Market:
  » Fortune 5000 Real and Personal Property Taxpayers
  
• Challenge:
  » Replace Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) infrastructure
  » Ensure reliability of mission-critical online transaction database
  » Centralize storage of large amounts of customer data
  » Expand database application with ability to handle heavy transaction processing loads
  » Implement fail-safe, redundant and standards-based solution to support rapidly growing customer base
  
• iSCSI Solution:
  » Alacritech® SES1001T iSCSI Accelerators accessing Network Appliance™ FAS270s
  
• Benefits:
  » Cost-effective and easy-to-manage iSCSI Storage-Attached Network (SAN)
  » Centralized management of large amounts of customer data
  » Redundancy assured; hardware-related support calls dropped to zero
  » Online transaction database performance increased 3-6 fold; thousands of customer transactions processed per minute
  » New infrastructure to support larger enterprise-level customers
  » IP-based storage network can be supported by existing IT staff
  » Future storage growth can be addressed with cost-effective, standards-based equipment
  

“ePropertyTax is the only Web-native property tax ASP, and has a rapidly growing customer base of corporate property taxpayers. Our customers have acute reporting demands that may require them to process hundreds of thousands of transactions in a compressed time frame prior to an inflexible filing deadline. Our new NetApp/Alacritech SAN has provided ePropertyTax an immediate return-on-investment. With our new infrastructure we are able to more rapidly and reliably process property tax information for our customers, and meet the requirements of the most rigorous technology audits. The IP SAN has enabled us to support more transactions per server, while at the same time improving performance. Our system is now scalable and fail-safe in every aspect which translates into a high degree of customer satisfaction.”
    Richard Nearhood, CEO, ePropertyTax
    ePropertyTax, Inc.

Business Overview:
ePropertyTax®, Inc. is the developer of Property Tax Office®, the only fully Web-enabled property tax management software system. ePropertyTax has created the software system of choice in the award-winning Property Tax Office® for Fortune 5000 property taxpayers. Property Tax Office® allows corporate property taxpayers to reduce their overall tax liabilities, lower their administrative costs, and reduce their exposure to fines and penalties. Property Tax Office® has the largest number of registered users of any property tax system, and annually processes tax data on more than $120 billion in assets and $4 billion in annual property tax payments. ePropertyTax counts some of the largest corporations in the United States as customers, including many of the Fortune 1000, and is one of only five real estate industry companies to receive Forbes Magazine’s distinguished “Best of the Web” award. ePropertyTax is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and its main production facility and co-location site is in Phoenix.

Business Challenge:
ePropertyTax’s innovative Property Tax Office software suite consists of three modules: Tax Manager Module™, Asset Manager Module™, and Workflow Manager Module™ that enable customers to process and track tax bills and file personal property returns. ePropertyTax is responsible for hosting the applications and managing critical customer data for its large and rapidly growing user base. With its ever-increasing database transaction processing loads, the company foresaw its existing clustered Progress® database system using DAS would not be able to provide the required stability and performance. In anticipation of the 2005 personal property tax filing season, Brent Erdman, ePropertyTax’s Director of Development, began planning a new, fully scalable networked storage environment with the failover and redundancy required to meet customer needs for uptime, stability and reliability.

ePropertyTax had two key storage requirements to meet: “First, we required a dedicated high performance SAN to support the database,” said Erdman. “Second, we required shared storage to store customer’s personal property return PDFs and scanned images which needed central access from all the servers.” In short, the ideal production environment required both a SAN and a Networked-Attached Storage (NAS) system that could scale over the long-term, without downtime, and without sacrificing database performance. Erdman also wanted to ensure the new system was cost-effective and based on industry standards so that it could be easily managed by the company’s existing IT staff. While visiting the company’s co-location site, Liz Nelson, ePropertyTax’s Director of IT, learned that Network Appliance’s FAS270 filer could perform as both a SAN and a NAS system and was touted to be highly reliable.

The ePropertyTax team contacted the experts at Custom Storage, a leading data storage solutions company based in Scottsdale, Arizona who also recommended Network Appliance’s FAS270 filer. “The NetApp FAS270 offers a significant advantage over competing solutions as it dedicates raw volumes to the servers over the iSCSI connections for high performance database applications and it also serves up network addressable file space that all the servers can see to provide both a SAN and NAS in one subsystem,” said Pete Schmitt, Vice President of Engineering, Custom Storage.

Alacritech Solution and Benefits:
“During peak filing season our servers are hit with tens of thousands of database transactions per minute which places a heavy burden on the servers and on the disk subsystems,” said Liz Nelson. “To ensure efficient server and database application performance, we first required the intensive storage I/O processing to be offloaded from the server CPUs, then we needed to speed iSCSI data to and from the iSCSI storage. We looked at the Adaptec cards but found the cards did not provide any failover capabilities and we would be required to take our systems offline to expand the storage on the servers. We found that Alacritech’s iSCSI Accelerator was the only card capable of providing native hardware acceleration for the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator which would allow us to expand LUNs in real time. The Alacritech Accelerators are also pre-certified with the NetApp system and are the only cards with failover capabilities, an absolutely essential requirement for our mission-critical network.”

Custom Storage quickly designed and implemented ePropertyTax’s iSCSI storage network solution which consisted of two NetApp® FAS270 filers and two Alacritech iSCSI Accelerators teamed together in each of eight Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers running Microsoft® Server™ 2003. The results of the NetApp/Alacritech iSCSI SAN solution were immediate. “With the flexibility of a SAN and NAS subsystem running in conjunction with the Alacritech iSCSI Accelerators on the server side, we immediately saw a 3-6 fold performance increase in transactions,” noted Erdman who was first to test the system. “We were able to load and process a customer data file containing over 400,000 records in less than 45 minutes, which would have taken our previous system 2-3 hours to process. We can now efficiently support much larger enterprise-level customers, and with the system’s instantaneous failover ability, they are 100% assured their critical data will always be available during tax season.”

The award-winning Alacritech SES1001 iSCSI Accelerator is the industry’s top-performing iSCSI controller and is the only card to accelerate the full Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator. Based on Alacritech’s patented SLIC Technology® Data Path Offload (DPO) architecture, the SES1001 enables wire-speed performance and a significantly higher transaction rate over all other iSCSI cards. Alacritech Accelerators work to offload TCP/IP and iSCSI processing from the host CPU to significantly improve host processor efficiency, increase data throughput and reduce latency.

Low Total Cost of Ownership, Immediate ROI
“The Alacritech iSCSI Accelerators are the lowest priced, highest performing iSCSI controllers on the market, in fact, customers can deploy two Alacritech cards and save two thousand dollars per port in comparison to the price of one Fibre Channel card,” noted Pete Schmitt, Custom Storage. “In addition, our NetApp customers are assured of seamless interoperability through Alacritech’s ‘NetApp-supported’ qualification—the result is a proven solution for consolidating and centralizing storage management while maintaining maximum application performance and scalability.”

“Downtime is money, so we’re extremely pleased that hardware failures have dropped to zero,” stated Erdman. “Most importantly, our customers are even more impressed with our product’s reliability. Our customers require 100% system availability. By eliminating downtime, our customer support department has also saved time and money. Our production environment is now fully scalable and future-ready. As we add customers, we can easily add cost-effective, standards-based hardware and can support it with our existing staff avoiding the costs of expensive alternative equipment, specialized staff and on-going maintenance.”

System Configuration: