ANL Amer Land Lease

Weather, regulatory requirements and data availability needs forced American Land Lease (NYSE: ANL), a Florida developer, to consider a solid computer network backup and disaster recovery system. D-Link, a leading end-to-end networking solutions provider for consumers and business, was chosen to meet the challenge.

Located in Clearwater, Florida in the middle of "hurricane alley," American Land Lease develops innovative, resort-style communities for active adults, with more than 7,500 operational home sites in more than 30 communities throughout the United States.

As a publicly traded company, American Land Lease must meet Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements for regulators, auditors and shareholders, which requirements magnify the need for a reliable computer network backup and disaster recovery system. Brutal hurricane seasons also raised concerns about backup, disaster recovery and business continuity, as any data loss or system interruption could severely cripple its nationwide operations.

"Loss of data due to power outages, hurricanes or worse is a major concern," said Steve Ames, Virtualization Performance president, a D-Link� value-added reseller (VAR) that was brought in to assess options and recommend solutions. "The real challenge was determining how to find a solution that appropriately suited American Land Lease's needs and met its budget requirements."

Virtualization Performance suggested a simple and cost-effective solution with D-Link Systems, Inc. and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), a software developer and a global leader in the virtualization market.

The solution combines American Land Lease's standard servers with a D-Link xStack� switch and two D-Link xStack Storage� DSN-3200 iSCSI SANs, one at its data center and another at its disaster recovery site.

"The DSN-3200 is the perfect solution for a small to medium-sized company that has some enterprise business continuity needs," said Ames. "The company can get it done at a reasonable price and still meet data availability, back-up and regulatory compliance requirements. It's the first credible platform out there that can do this. Plus, it's rather simple to set up in comparison to some of the other alternatives."

Now American Land Lease can manage sales, accounting, email and database systems as logically separate virtual machines in the VMware ESX environment.

"The D-Link DSN-3200 alone improves performance dramatically, while VMware provides previously unattainable backup and failover capability," Ames said. "And since the virtual machine file is portable, it can easily be moved to any host. That's a capability which is really unique to virtualization."

The DSN-3200 uses existing Ethernet networks, so there's no investment required for costly Fibre Channel infrastructure. By avoiding Fibre Channel, the iSCSI SAN reduces the per-Gigabyte cost of storage significantly. The unit's 10Gbit iSCSI System-on-a-Chip (SoC) handles over 80,000 I/Os per second and is capable of supporting 15TB raw capacity using 1TB hard drives. With the I/O controller and processing in the DSN-3200 itself, American Land Lease avoids the performance degradation of solutions that place processing demands on data center servers or remote storage array systems.

"Since American Land Lease can quickly failover to the disaster recovery site without any data loss, the D-Link/VMware solution immediately satisfies data security, business continuity and regulatory requirements," said Ames. "If the primary data center is unavailable, its entire enterprise can be up and running very quickly with the same exact systems at the disaster recovery site."

About D-Link

D-Link is the global leader in connectivity for small, medium and large enterprise business networking. The company is an award-winning designer, developer and manufacturer of networking, broadband, digital electronics, voice, data and video communications solutions for the digital home, Small Office/Home Office (SOHO), Small to Medium Business (SMB), and Workgroup to Enterprise environments. With millions of networking and connectivity products manufactured and shipped, D-Link is a dominant market participant and price/performance leader in the networking and communications market. D-Link Systems, Inc. headquarters are located at 17595 Mt. Herrmann Street, Fountain Valley, Calif., 92708. Phone (800) 326-1688 or (714) 885-6000; FAX (866) 743-4905; Internet www.dlink.com.

D-Link, xStack, xStack Storage and the D-Link logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of D-Link Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other third party marks mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright � 2008. D-Link Corporation/D-Link Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.