Disaster recovery system just the ticket
BY DELL
Maintaining system availability and business continuity can be an expensive exercise, particularly when IT teams spend hours each month on manual backup. But, as staff at UK-based National Car Parks (NCP) found, centralisation and automation can be achieved quickly and simply, without investing in expensive training and complex deployments.
NCP is the UK’s leading provider of parking services, supplying around 200,000 spaces across more than 700 locations. Its 3,500 employees need fast, consistent access to information. However, increasing data volumes made the company’s direct-attached storage (DAS) approach inadequate. Storage utilisation was as low as 25 per cent and routine management tasks such as backup and capacity expansion were time-consuming. What’s more, the absence of a comprehensive disaster recovery system raised concerns about downtime in the event of an outage or server failure.
The company has two standalone datacentres – at Docklands in London and Croydon in Surrey. These housed 80 servers, each containing a discrete pool of data, along with one fibre channel storage unit. Backup was a slow process. The IT team spent 10 days a month saving data to tape for off-site archiving by a third party. Recovering data meant calling a warehouse and retrieving the tapes, and without continuous backup the data was around eight hours old. Meanwhile, adding capacity to the storage units often took a whole weekend, and any additional storage functionality meant extra fees and long waiting times for deliveries.
To solve the problem, Martin Law, Head of IT at NCP, decided to deploy storage area networks (SANs). “We knew that our storage requirements would continue to grow, but storing information in single servers meant low utilisation rates, and often slow recovery times,” says Law.
In addition, NCP wanted to virtualize its server infrastructure to increase availability for end users – a move contingent on storage consolidation. Law and his team investigated their options and soon settled on the Dell EqualLogic PS series SAN. Its iSCSI technology meant rapid integration with NCP’s existing IP network, along with all-inclusive tools to simplify management and maximise availability.
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Working with technology partner Krome Technologies, Law decided to evaluate fibre channel and iSCSI SAN devices. “We looked at what would give us the best performance, while being the simplest and most cost-effective to run. We also needed scalability. Dell EqualLogic PS series SANs were the best fit, with a high price–performance ratio, simple deployment using our existing IP networks and fast expansion,” says Law.
Law initially installed two PS4000E SANs – one at each site. Out-of-thebox Auto-Replication software means that each SAN can asynchronously replicate selected data volumes, so that data is continuously protected. “We wanted to start small and grow incrementally, once we got used to the new technology. That made the PS4000E and PS5000E SANs just right,” says Law.
In a second phase, the company implemented two PS5000E SANs at the Docklands site. Two more mirrored PS5000E SANs will complete the infrastructure, which connects with the local area network and NCP’s virtualized servers via redundant
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