Storage Cat 08 3/10/08 17:04 Page 28
28 ADVERTORIAL
AN EDUCATED SOLUTION
Pinnacles of learning, Oriel and Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford,
cleverly utilise thin-provisioning in a highly available storage environment and
achieve full disaster recovery between college campuses
Words: By DataCore Software/NCE
DataCore’s SANmelody optimises VMware environments with its ability to thin-provision storage over our existing
with new degrees of flexibility and robustness. Ethernet architecture and Fibre Channel connectivity, and we
Oriel and Corpus Christi colleges have been renowned were comfortable that this would be a good choice”.
centres of learning since the 12th century and boasts famous The ability to thin-provision storage allows the university to
former student Sir Walter Raleigh, but it’s the present day centrally provide capacity on demand, presenting virtual
students, fellows and lecturers who demand the latest IT volumes from the central storage pool to the applications,
infrastructure to facilitate a modern digital university status. allocating capacity only when really needed.
Dave Hart is the IT Manager tasked with delivering and
managing this environment for both Colleges and following a High Availability and Disaster Recovery secured:
recommendation from his peers in Oxford University’s Each college currently has 1.5TB of “real” usable storage
Computing Services Team, Dave began to discuss his capacity beneath SANmelody, offering synchronous mirroring
objectives with DataCore’s authorised partner, NCE. and auto-failover for path and data for transparent high
“Our initial goal was to address server consolidation, availability. DataCore’s “AIM” (Asynchronous IP Mirroring)
disaster recovery and introduce a platform for further feature is used to replicate data of the two colleges over a
expansion,” explains Dave, “We currently have about 30 Dell low bandwidth link for disaster recovery purposes offering
Servers and 200 PCs across both college sites and synchronous mirroring and auto failover for path and data.
approximately 1,000 staff and students – with an environment This resultant high availability solution allows full restoration
that is continually growing and making increasing demands on automatically within minutes.
the IT infrastructure.”
Working with NCE, Dave has now implemented a solution Higher degrees of Management through effective
that encompasses both Server & Storage Virtualisation using storage allocation:
VMware and DataCore Software. What Dave and his team have also found is that utilising two
From a server virtualisation perspective, there are a pair of SANmelody’s has allowed them to share their primary volumes
VMware ESX Servers in each college running Vmotion, DR and more evenly to achieve effective load balancing. And the
HA. “This provides the colleges with a greater level of flexible management offered means that the days of guessing
resilience than the previous structure” Dave adds “and also a the correct allocation of disk space are long gone.
quicker path to Disaster Recovery.” Beneath enhancements “Now that we have implemented it, we appreciate that
in functionality it delivers other benefits to the colleges: SANmelody delivers additional functionality and flexibility over a
“Consolidating servers to a virtualised solution has presented traditional hardware based solution.” Concludes Dave.
quantifiable savings. Once complete, a total of around 20 “The implementation went very well -once the necessary
servers will have been rationalised and moved over to the configuration was carried out on VMware ESX and DataCore
virtualised solution. We estimate that the cost of running SANmelody, the storage was presented to ESX as usable
each server (power, cooling, spares etc.) is around £700 per space and it was seamless from thereon. Overall ESX and
annum, which timed by 20 represents a significant saving over SANmelody working in tandem provide us with a scalable,
a period of several years.” flexible, resilient platform – ideal for both production and
test environments.”
Robustly supporting the VMware applications – Dave Hart, IT Manager, Oriel & Corpus Christi Colleges,
DataCore’s
™
SANmelody
™
: University of Oxford.
Storage virtualisation has been provided using DataCore’s
SANmelody solution. Dave didn’t jump both feet first into Stop by Stand 555, DataCore Software and NCE to
investing in this aspect. “When we saw the DataCore find out more.
solution and grasped that it would run on a standard windows
server and could also utilise existing hardware, we quickly
www.datacore.com
realised that this would represent a better buy. Couple this
www.ncegroup.com
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