Fujifilm UK deploys DataCore's SANmelody SAN infrastructure
DataCore Software Corp., a provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, announced Wednesday that together with DataCore's trained and accredited partner, Vcentral, it has installed SANmelody as the storage area network (SAN) virtual infrastructure at Fujifilm UK.
"Consolidation was becoming increasingly necessary to stem the pressure on the team having to backup, manage and ultimately move redundant servers," stated Manish Amriwala, network and desktop support team manager, Fujifilm UK. "We needed a dedicated SAN and virtualized servers that would accommodate our growth and transition us from the restrictions of disk space provided by direct-attached storage."
DataCore, a provider of storage virtualization SAN software, changes the economics of managing storage with software that combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence. DataCore lowers the cost and complexity of IT by making storage efficient, fast, flexible, fail-safe and virtual.
DataCore's portable storage server software simplifies and automates capacity expansion and centralizes storage management for Windows, Unix, Linux, MacOS and NetWare operating systems, as well as hypervisors from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and other suppliers. DataCore is privately held and its corporate headquarters are in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
After considering the results of a full cost of ownership report provided by Vcentral, which predicted that Fujifilm UK could have an effective, robust, virtualized environment using only two-thirds of the hardware whilst also providing a disaster recovery (DR) solution, Fujifilm UK deployed three DataCore SANmelody 2.0 Fibre Channel SANs running on HP ML370 G5 machines with 12 x 146Gb SAS disks on each machine.
Two SANmelody servers act as identical mirrors in active mode, while one is located in a separate DR site five miles from the main data center and is connected using a 10 Mb (megabit) LAN (local area network) extension link. In this configuration, SANmelody supports four VMware servers and twelve virtual servers and applications running on the network and provides a full DR solution.
Rollout commenced in March 2008 and within two months all major applications were transferred onto the 12 virtual servers. The network carries 3.4 TB (terabytes) or 1.7 TB mirrored of data, with a further 50 percent expansion remaining available.
Installation was a seamless and relatively painless process noted Manish. "Within just 2-3 hours we had an operational business continuity and disaster recovery solution up and running," he said. "Now maintenance and allocating storage is much easier. Using SANmelody in a mirrored configuration, patches and new applications and servers can be easily uploaded; as one SANmelody box can be taken down without any interruption to business applications as the other SANmelody takes over."
In addition, there have been notable financial benefits in terms of cost savings managing the new virtualized data center environment. The team has equated the reduction of costs for the entire virtualization campaign to be roughly GBP 50,000 or GBP 80,000 per annum, in terms of reduction of man days for management and maintenance.
"What Fujifilm UK together with Vcentral have installed is a highly resilient, cost-effective, stable onsite SAN solution that has allowed for full disaster recovery - and they are reaping the benefits of a hardware-agnostic, flexible and 'portable' software solution," commented Keith Joseph, regional manager, DataCore Software.
source: http://www.wwpi.com/nas-a-san-storage-solutions/7294-fujifilm-uk-deploys-datacores-sanmelody-san-infrastructure
|
|
|
