Case Story Feature: Volkswagen UK Unit Centralises, Virtualises Its Storage with DataCore SANmelody

Volkswagen Unit Centralises, Virtualises Its Storage
DataCore's SANmelody lets the VW Financial Services unit provide storage from a central pool for all types of applications
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=172103&WT.svl=news2_1
Despite a long series of ad campaigns in which it encouraged customers to "Think Small," Volkswagen in the U.K. was finding out that it needed to think big. The company's data storage requirements were growing exponentially. Email and database requirements were getting bigger all the time. Meanwhile, the company was moving to a blade server environment to keep its data center from being any bigger than it needed to be. The answer was to virtualize its storage.
"What we were looking for is a way to centralize our storage," says Mike Duxbury, senior service specialist for Volkswagen Financial Services for the U.K., in Milton Keynes, U.K. "Like many companies, we suffered from disparate disks on separate servers. So we centralized our storage. We also wanted to mirror the data."

While Volkswagen has corporate standards for applications and databases, such as requiring Oracle for all corporate databases, regional operations can choose their own infrastructure. "We are using SANmelody, which is a storage virtualization product from DataCore http://www.datacore.com/ ," Duxbury says. "We wanted to do mirroring in real time rather than asynchronously over a fiber network. We actually use the product with iSCSI." One of the main reasons for using iSCSI was the ease with which it would fit into his existing Ethernet switched network, he says.

One of the nice features, Duxbury says, is the thin provisioning network managed volumes: "If you decide to give a server two terabytes of storage, it won't actually use it until it needs it." And SANmelody is flexible enough that you can actually allocate more storage than is physically present in the SAN, he says. This allows volumes to change their sizes as the needs of the system change. "If you haven't got the physical storage to back it up, you need to keep an eye on it so you won't run out," he cautions. But NMV also provides some critical benefits. "There's none of this building of a physical server when you need something more."

Volkswagen Financial serves out its virtual storage from a central pool. "It will be financial data, email databases, SQL databases, application services, enterprise vaults or email archiving databases," he says. "It makes it very easy to integrate different types of storage."
In the data center, "with the exception of our domain controllers, all of our data is stored on a Melody storage server," he says. "We use HP blade servers to connect to our storage servers via iSCSI. We use Microsoft iSCSI and DataCore MPIO multi-pathing software. This allows a SAN to change paths in the event of a server crash."

While the primary thrust of Volkswagen Financial's storage effort was efficiency, there were other benefits -- most notably, ease of management....

Another benefit is improved performance. "We didn't benchmark it before we integrated," he says. "We've noticed considerable improvement through virtual servers. We were running off of local disks. Now we're running off virtual disks."
In addition to storage, the company moved its SQL implementation to a single clustered environment. "Because of the way iSCSI works, we've been able to cluster our servers," he says. "We could lose the entire building and not lose our servers. It's very cost effective as well compared to EMC."
...He expects to save about £30,000 in energy costs during the first three years of use, with 60 percent of his machines using virtual storage.
But perhaps the best benefit from an IT manager's viewpoint is something else. "This has made my life easier," Duxbury says. "I'm a huge fan of the product, and it has made managing our data a lot easier. We can do maintenance on-site now and take entire buildings down and not lose IT services. That's something we've never been able to do before DataCore."