"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 virtualised servers that would accommodate our growth and transition us from the restrictions of disk space provided by Direct Attached Storage."
After considering the results of a full cost of ownership report provided by DataCore partner Vcentral which predicted that FUJIFILM UK could have an effective, robust virtualised environment using only 2/3rd of the hardware whilst also providing a watertight Disaster Recovery solution, FUJIFILM UK adopted 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; and one being located in a separate DR site 5 miles from the main datacentre connected using a 10Mb LAN Extension link. In this configuration, SANmelody robustly supports the four VMware servers and twelve virtual servers and applications running on the network and provides a full Disaster Recovery solution.
Rollout commenced since March 2008 and within 2 months all major applications were transferred onto the 12 virtual servers. The network carries 3,4 TB or 1.7TB mirrored of data with a further 50% expansion remaining available. Installation was a seamless and relatively painless process notes Manish, "Within just 2-3 hours we had an operational business continuity and disaster recovery solution up and running. 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"
Plus there have been notable financial benefits in terms of cost savings managing the new virtualised datacentre environment. The team have equated the reduction of costs for the entire virtualisation campaign to being that of around £50,000 - £80,00 per annum in terms of reduction of man days for management and maintenance.
http://www.it-analysis.com/news_release.php?rel=11956
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