Powering through storage challenges
19
1-2-1 P
E.ON IS UK had recently deployed a tiered storage architecture based on
technology from Hitachi Data Systems.
SNS Europe talks to Peter Arrell, Head of Storage UK at E.ON IS.
E.ON IS UK, founded in address this issue quickly but architecture based on
ETER
January 2006, is a subsidiary cost effectively. technology from Hitachi Data
of E.ON IS GmbH. With a team Systems. Its key business
of over 400 employees, E.ON The IT team reviewed its critical business applications
ARRELL
IS UK is the IT shared service storage environment with a were stored in its “top”
provider for E.ON UK. Keen to view to increasing its storage tier, based on a
optimise the energy efficiency capacity-to-power ratio while Hitachi Universal Storage
of its data centre and create a consolidating its existing PlatformTM.
virtualised, easy-to-manage resources.
storage environment, it Other applications and its
worked with Hitachi Data Head of Storage UK at E.ON development environment
Systems to devise a migration IS, Peter Arrell explains: “We were supported by the second
strategy. By incorporating already had a tiered storage and third storage tiers, which
additional capacity and using architecture in place but were sat on Hitachi Adaptable
Hitachi software to migrate finding that it was hard to Modular Storage 1000 and
data, it has simplified its maintain visibility of capacity Hitachi Workgroup Modular
storage management and use and availability, so we Storage 100 systems,
improved its business weren’t using it to the respectively.
performance. best advantage. Adding
to this complexity, we “We were pleased with the
With the volume of data being had standalone storage performance of our new
stored across its IT environments for some parts storage tiers and wanted to
environment increasing, E.ON of the business. We wanted to develop this solution further
IS UK was challenged with bring all these resources to really enhance our energy
balancing the requirement for together with one central efficiency and
more capacity with demands point of management to responsiveness,” says Arrell.
from its customer base to simplify our role and speed
provide high levels of service up the response time to The team decided to migrate
and reliability. Adding extra requests for capacity from the the data on its third storage
capacity to its platform had business.” tier onto the Hitachi
traditionally been a time- Adaptable Modular Storage
consuming and complex In order to achieve this, Arrell system with SATA disk drives
process, which could impact and his team devised a in order to benefit from its
its end users’ productivity. strategy to consolidate its greater capacity and
Loss of productivity can mean storage systems into a single performance. This would
a drop in customer service, virtual environment. enable them to also migrate
and in the competitive the data currently stored in
utilities industry, customer Building on Strong other places into the tiered
satisfaction is an imperative Foundations environment while leaving
ingredient of success. The E.ON IS UK had recently capacity to support continued
company therefore needed to deployed a tiered storage business growth.
aWWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK SEPT 09
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