It’s been a couple of years since the Canada Lands Company (CLC) implemented a new data storage system on relatively new technology. Today, the IT director says it was the right decision – but one that came with an important lesson.
“It’s a tough call when you have to be on the bleeding edge,” says Rob Murdoch. “If you make a mistake, how do you get yourself out of the mess?”
CLC is known as a self-financing crown corporation: it’s a part of the government, but all of its funding comes from its own operations and bank loans when needed. Its mandate: sell surplus government land across the country in a responsible manner. That means getting top dollar while ensuring the land will be used in ways that jibe with the surrounding area. “We always have to be aware of what’s going on in the local community and what their concerns are,” Murdoch explains.
CLC produces a lot of data, so information storage is an important concern. In around 2006, the organization decided it was time to refresh its storage system, because the existing platform was aging and CLC didn’t want to waste time and money nursing it beyond its limit.
“We store all of the data files, whether they’re contracts, CAD drawings, PDF files, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, databases – pretty much everything,” Murdoch says. “It’s one of the core infrastructure pieces that we need to be up and running all the time.”
The old system used Fibre Channel (FC) technology. Upgrading to another FC system seemed expensive. “We’re in the SMB market space,” Murdoch says, explaining that CLC has about 80 staff members. “I felt that the Fibre Channel was more for the enterprise level – you get enterprise costs that go with it. The long-term strategy was to move to something a little more affordable, reduce the complexity, and have my guys be able to support it.”
