Articles

The Challenge

Despite its truly global reach and 24x7 operational profile, the company – which now supplies over 80% of the world's fruit labels – runs a small, tight IT resource, led by its IT Manager Barry Watts. His problem: maintain what still positively contributed to the company's needs in terms of data control and information archiving while refreshing the underlying infrastructure and, if possible, realising some of the cost-benefits of a move to a virtualised alternative – without breaking the bank.

“We had an existing NAS (network attached storage) and DAS (direct attached storage) system which was running out of space and was also based on servers that were coming to the end of their life-cycle,” he says. “Virtualisation made sense as a way to rationalise all this, but we had the 'complication' that we had no desire to end our practice of backing up to tape, not disk.”

Thus, Watts' challenge was to find a cost-effective storage and virtualisation upgrade option that would preserve what he wanted from his existing environment, ideally delivered by an implementation partner that would not try and merely sell him the vanilla-flavoured solution as that would not be fit for his organisational needs.

The Benefits

MTI was able to meet this client's demands with a combination of proven, industry-leading technology and project management skills centred on a commitment to understanding Sinclair's environment and specific needs. Specifically, an EMC SAN infrastructure of 12.7TB has been deployed which unusually offers Watts' team full backup of everything in the new storage array via daily snapshots (carried out by EMC replication manager software), automated drive mounting and executed by existing Symantec BackupExec processes onto tape, as desired. The solution has thus enabled the migration of virtual servers into the SAN, meaning they were able to replace 32 large LAS based servers with 10 virtual host servers each with only a pair of mirrored system drives. All users and drive maps were also moved, with no disruption to business processes, from one environment to another seamlessly. Meanwhile, Sinclair is using single tier implementation for all drives, resulting in them all being of the same speed – which in turn means the actual response for recovery documents is much faster. Plus, there was no requirement to buy new NAS, as a the EMC NS-120 not only combined CiFS and iSCSI storage, but the very powerful EMC de-duplication software delivered 'back'40% of the space previously taken up by CiFS data. This all now dovetails with the firm's new virtual (Microsoft Hyper V-based) infrastructure, as well as delivering approximately 2TB of storage via CiFS/NFS to the company's business users, and integration with the main Active Directory structure to boot.

“In effect we have reduced overhead and cost, achieved more file space capacity and kept what we wanted from our previous way of working,” enthuses Watts. “Given our small team and the reach of the business, reliability and simplicity are key and I am very satisfied we have got that.”

As well as the robustness and functionality of the new SAN structure, Watts also praises the approach of MTI’s implementation team. “MTI worked hard with us to make this work,” he says. “There were other alternatives who felt their products were so good they deserved a premium in the price. I didn't agree – and I am glad to say, neither did MTI. I also have great confidence in their support processes. All in all, the MTI team took the time to understand us and I cannot speak too highly of their overall professionalism.”

• Posted on: 21st June 2011 at 12:00am
• Topics: Virtualisation; The Cloud; Consolidation;