Newcastle International Airport flies high with DataCore's SANmelody

Newcastle International Airport flies high using DataCore’s SANmelody™ to provide high availability and provision virtual storage to complete their virtualised infrastructure.

DataCore Software and partner Waterstons have installed SANmelody™ as the storage area network (SAN) virtual infrastructure within the Airport’s data centres.

“We are now realising the significant benefits of our virtualisation solution including reduced maintenance costs, energy savings in line with our ‘green’ initiatives and improved Disaster Recovery processes. DataCore's software and Waterstons’ expertise has been invaluable in this project.” George Nesbitt, General Manager of Business Development and IT, Newcastle International.

Newcastle International evaluated several SAN technologies before deciding to choose DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation solution for this project. SANmelody offered an attractive mix of comprehensive feature set, strong track record and the capability to leverage relatively low cost storage hardware, comparing favourably to other SAN solutions. Two storage servers were deployed, one in each IT facility. Inbuilt synchronous replication across gigabit networks ensures that both storage servers are identical ‘block level’ copies of each other. In the event of a component failure affecting either storage server, the other server instantly takes over workload.

Newcastle International connected the two data centres over an IP based network. iSCSI technology was key for the airport as it would readily operate over the highly resilient Ethernet network which connected the two data centres together.

“We increasingly see iSCSI adoption as the protocol of choice over the more expensive Fibre Channel. This is largely owing to its good performance at a relatively inexpensive price.” commented Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, DataCore Software.