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Fujifilm UK reports success with data centre virtualisation project
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03/07/2009
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Fujifilm UK says it is using a virtualised storage solution to protect its IT infrastructure and improve disaster recovery and storage management. The company is using DataCore's SANmelody as the SAN (storage area network) virtual infrastructure, installed by partner Vcentral.
"Consolidation was becoming increasingly necessary to stem the pressure on the team having to backup, manage and ultimately move redundant servers." explains Manish Amriwala, network and desktop support team manager at 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."
Vcentral's study predicted that Fujifilm UK could have an effective, robust virtualised environment using only two thirds of its existing hardware, while also providing a watertight disaster recovery solution.
As a result, the company 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 mirrors in active mode, while one is located in a separate DR site five miles from the main data centre, connected using a 10Mb LAN extension link.
The system supports four VMware servers and 12 virtual servers and applications, running on the network.
Says Amriwala: "Within just two to three 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 while the other SANmelody takes over."
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Author
Brian Tinham
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