Quorn Foods announces “5 Nines” Availability and improved SAP ERP
productivity with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V and Total Virtualised Infrastructure
Overhaul:
Leading food brand optimises Tier 1 applications; enables
Information Lifecycle Management via Auto Tiering and shores up the entire
Virtualised Estate.
Quorn Foods have adopted SANsymphony-V software to achieve
High Availability; turbo charged application performance and have engaged
intelligent Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) data flow with structured
Auto Tiering.
Marlow Foods, better
known as the owner of the Quorn brand, offers quality low fat, meat free food
products to the discerning, health conscious customer. Employing
600 across three UK sites, Quorn’s Head of IT is Fred Holmes. Back in 2011 when sold from a large parent
company, Quorn had the opportunity to remap the entire existing physical server
infrastructure which was rapidly falling
outside of warranty. Fred notes:-
“This was a
three phrase project and had to be classified as a major systems overhaul that
we were embarking on. In Phase 1, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V enabled smooth
migration within a two-week period and dramatically increased IOPS, even with
the high burden that virtual servers place when they are delivering thin client
capabilities”.
Phase 1: Server side
Virtualisation Progresses into Greenfield Site with DataCore providing the
centralised storage and 99.999% reliability:
They consulted their
trusted IT partner and DataCore gold partner, Waterstons, to assist with the
major infrastructure overhaul. A greenfield site for virtualisation, Fred and
the assigned Waterstons project team, provided compelling financial analysis showing
dramatic consolidation and resource savings to boot. A working proof of concept
was deployed to substantiate findings and test that a Microsoft Remote Desktop
Services (RDS) farm could support all applications for test user group, and to
prove the benefits of server virtualization.
Two successful months
later, the project team implemented full server side virtualisation with three
additional R710 hosts, all Brocade Fibre Channel attached to a storage area
network (SAN) to support the full VMware vSphere Enterprise feature set. In
total 30 workloads were virtualised into the new environment to allow older
physical servers to be retired. From the Desktop perspective, a new RDS farm
replaced 400 traditional desktops with thin client capabilities. DataCore’s
SANsymphony-V solution provided the essential cost-effective centralised
storage running across two Dell T710 commodity servers. DataCore’s storage
hypervisor provided one general purpose synchronously mirrored SAN pool of 7TB
usable (across a total of 48 10k SAS spindles in MD1220 SAS-attached storage
shelves) to provide 99.999% reliability. The project team knew that the success
of any robust, responsive VMware environment hinges on the abilities and
performance of the storage infrastructure that sits beneath. This was
especially true in Quorn’s highly virtualised infrastructure with users
interacting directly with virtual RDS Session Hosts. From a business user
perception, the virtualised estate provided them with a turbocharged world.
Phase II – taking Business
Critical ERP into the Virtual World and using DataCore to reduce data mining
times from 20 minutes to 20 seconds:
Phase II covered
virtualisation of SAP Enterprise Resource Planning for financial, HR, accounts
and sales platforms. With around 8,500 outlets that stock the Quorn brand
across the UK alone, Marlow Foods have an extremely high dependency on their
SAP ERP servers to drive critical business advantages across all departments.
The challenge was to integrate the current SAP physical servers into the
virtualised environment, whilst maintaining their 99.999% reliability and not
affecting existing virtual machines reliant on the SAN. To address this
challenge, the project team added another R710 host to the cluster, and a
further 4TB of usable synchronously mirrored storage within a new storage pool
dedicated entirely to SAP (across a further 48 10k SAS spindles) and began the
process to rebuild their SAP servers into the virtual infrastructure. This
meant transitioning huge databases from the old physical environment. Proof
would come at the end of the month, when database queries were traditionally
the highest and performance expectations were unmet with erratic response
times.
In fact, the data
mining queries were returned within 20 seconds, compared to 20 minutes in the
previous physical environment. This is in no small part down to the way that
DataCore’s SANsymphony-V leverages disk resources, assigning I/O tasks to very
fast server RAM and CPU to accelerate throughput and to speed up response when
reading and writing to disk. And with the wholly mirrored configuration,
continuous availability is afforded.
“Like all things in IT, dramatic improvements to the infrastructure
remain invisible to the user who only notices when things go wrong. But in this
instance, no one could fail to notice the dramatic leaps in performance that
was now afforded.” Fred notes.
Phase III: Enhancing the
Virtualised Estate with Auto-Tiering:
With everything
virtualised, Fred and the team gave themselves six months to reflect and
monitor the new infrastructure before suggesting additional enhancements. What
Fred suspected was that he could also achieve greater intelligence from the SAN
itself. Simon Birbeck, Waterstons, one
of the U.K.’s only DataCore Master Certified Installation Engineers,
designed a performance enhancing model
to automatically migrate data blocks to the most appropriate class of storage
within the estate. Thinly provisioned SAN capacity was at around 80%
utilization, but for 2013 planning Fred and the Waterstons team had allocated a
20% year-on-year growth, thereby potentially stretching utilisation to the
maximum by the end of the year. Simon recommended switching to a three tier SAN
design to facilitate the best cascading practices of Information Lifecycle
Management (ILM).
A red top tier
comprised a new layer of SSD flash storage, designed to be always full and
utilized by the most frequently read blocks for extremely fast response. A
pre-existing amber mid-tier caters for the average use data blocks served by
commodity 10k SAS drives. Sitting
beneath is a blue tier as the ‘catch all’ layer for the least frequently
accessed data, maintained on low cost, high capacity 7.2k SAS spindles.
Fred summarises, “What
Waterstons recommended was an intelligent usable form of ILM with DataCore’s
SANsymphony-V at the front-end making the intelligent decision as to which
blocks should be allocated where.”
Indeed SANsymphony-V
has provided both strong reporting and accurate planning for data growth.
Built-in diagnostics help to pro-actively identify when a problem is
manifesting, changing the management role from reactive to
proactive/intelligent. For the future,
Marlow Foods will look to expand on the high availability/business continuity
environment afforded by SANsymphony-V by adding a further asynchronous replica
at another site to further protect the SAP ERP environment. The scalability of
SANsymphony-V brings a new level of comfort not possible with other forms of
storage.
Fred takes the final
words: “DataCore’s SANsymphony-V now reliably underpins the entire estate.
From a transformation perspective we have new levels of availability and
enhanced decision making for both IT and the users.”
“The timing is perfect. DataCore has just updated its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform and it is well positioned to take advantage of the paradigm shift and acceptance of software-defined storage infrastructures,” said Murphy. “After doing the market research and getting feedback from numerous customers, it is clear to me that there is a large degree of pent-up customer demand. Needless to say, I’m eager to spread the word on DataCore’s value proposition and make a difference in this exciting and critical role.”
