READING, England & FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., July 25, 2011 – DataCore Software, the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software, today announced that the London Borough of Sutton has implemented DataCore’s storage hypervisor to manage and safeguard its data. Considered as one of London’s most desirable residential areas, the Borough is a popular choice for families wishing to enjoy the leafy suburbs, a safe environment and well maintained public services. Schools in the Borough are therefore generally both popular and oversubscribed.
“DataCore’s storage hypervisor gives us the tools to manage and has meant that our virtualized infrastructure is totally bullet proof. That equates to total confidence,” states Daniel Gale, schools network manager at the London Borough of Sutton.
Gale’s team centrally supports the IT environment for the Borough’s 45 primary and special needs schools and 12 high schools. He is responsible for providing an effective and secure network and central administration services for over 60,000 pupils and staff. Central infrastructure services that the IT team provides include the protection, backup and business continuity of all data relating to schools, pupils, coursework and email.
Gale was introduced to DataCore at a seminar run by Vcentral, a DataCore reseller specializing in all areas of virtualization, which showed DataCore running in conjunction with VMware and highlighted the full benefits a total virtualized infrastructure could deliver. Designing a total, virtualized solution followed, including recommendations for ongoing training, support and reutilization of hardware. Previously, the Borough had been running a traditional SAN (storage area network) with a configuration consisting of two administration Microsoft Cluster Server nodes together with a pair of Active Directory Servers – all of which provided failover for the local pool of data.
In order to achieve complete disaster recovery Gale knew that he needed to employ DataCore’s storage virtualization software on dual nodes running outside of the local cluster. This would provide the redundant mirroring configuration to avoid a single point of failure and achieve a highly available, highly resilient, stable SAN solution with true disaster recovery. Of further concern was that the existing MS Cluster configuration was over five years old and therefore slow and less reliable than the team would have liked. With little budget to spend on additional hardware and anxious to reutilize what was already in the data center, Vcentral reassuringly confirmed that they could expand the environment by simply adding DataCore virtualization software to empower their existing HP MSA 1000 hardware, together with deployment of two HP DL380 G5s to house the DataCore storage hypervisor software to manage their storage across separate sites.
The DataCore Solution: Reutilization Brings Recovery
Three, virtual hosts are now deployed across the data center – two in the Borough’s secondary education offices in Carshalton and one in the civic offices in central Sutton empowering disaster recovery (DR), all connected by Fibre. VMware’s vSphere was selected as the server virtualization platform, along with VMware Advanced Acceleration kit running on the six VMs. The existing HP MSA 1000 SATA enclosures were re-deployed to hold the mirror volumes from the remote site along with two HP DL380 G5s to house the DataCore software. At the Sutton DR site, the Borough has opted for the purchase of a HP ML370.
Results: Straight Talking Storage Allocation, Seamless Maintenance and No Downtime
One of the direct results of deployment has been that the central administration team’s procurement of additional disk has significantly decreased. DataCore storage virtualization software’s acceptance of any type of disk enables the Borough to literally add as they go and not have to over estimate how much disk is required each year. Moreover, DataCore’s thin provisioning means that a system administrator can quickly reallocate and assign spare disks as and when required from the central storage pool so there is no need to load up-front.
Now provisioning new storage, adding new machines and maintaining servers is a relatively seamless process – meaning the Borough avoids downtime. In addition, during one weekend after a power outage, when power was reconnected the DataCore storage virtualization server simply resumed and automatically re-synched with its partner with no disruption to users or inevitable loss of pupil data. Gale concludes, “What the new DataCore enhanced environment actually gives us is total peace of mind – whether we want add capacity, do maintenance or recover from an outage”
Read Full Case Study
Please go to London Borough of Sutton to see a full case study on their DataCore deployment.
About Vcentral
Vcentral specialize in the design and delivery of innovative business solutions which help organizations streamline processes, optimize existing assets and save money. For more information visit us at http://www.vcentral.co.uk.
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software is the industry’s premier provider of storage virtualization software. DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor software solves the big problem stalling virtualization initiatives by eliminating the storage-related barriers that make virtualization too difficult and too expensive. For additional information, visit the DataCore website at www.datacore.com or call (877) 780-5111.
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