Untitled Document
The Real Deal
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 4 No 06 - November/December 2004
With more than 1,200 employees across Europe, leading real estate services provider Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker needed a reliable IT infrastructure to drive its customer-centric business. It chose to work in close partnership with Hawke in order to analyse and resolve the issue.
Issue and Objective
Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker (C&W/H&B) prides itself on
delivering comprehensive real estate solutions to clients across the world. As a
result of a major relocation of its European headquarters in London, a complete
review of its IT needs was undertaken and a number of issues identified which
needed to be addressed. This included the decision to replace its Direct
Attached Storage (DAS) system to provide the scalability and resilience the
company needed to support its growth,.
Challenge
The biggest concern for C&W/H&B was the rapid growth of email and the amount of
electronic information it had to retain. With employees sending and receiving
more information, data was growing at 40% year on year and servers were reaching
their limit, requiring more storage to ensure email worked effectively.
This increase meant the system was hitting the ceiling of its overnight backup
window. C&W/H&B had difficulties guaranteeing that any lost files could be
recovered, because it was using single attached tape devices.
With the original infrastructure no longer able to keep pace with the business
demands, C&W/H&B used the introduction of a new data centre on the back of the
head office relocation to examine the viability of introducing a Storage Area
Network (SAN)-based solution.
“The entire backup and restore strategy was extremely complex and manually
intensive, causing major problems,” says C&W/H&B infrastructure support manager
Joe Burke. “The use of multiple media tape devices meant the firm’s
administration costs were increasing at a weekly rate, which was unsustainable.”
C&W/H&B required a complete bespoke solution that would offer the functionality
it needed to perform day-to-day tasks efficiently and provide scalability to
future proof its investment. It was critical that the solution clearly
demonstrated the benefit to C&W/H&B in terms of increasing application
performance to create a lower TCO and a quick ROI.
Solution
Hawke partnered with C&W/H&B to create a SAN proof of concept that took data
away from each server and into a central repository, to create a more flexible
and manageable infrastructure.
Hawke implemented a HP StorageWorks MSA 1000, reducing the complexity and
expense of SAN deployment and enabling additional storage capacity to be easily
added. To run file/print, domain, web, database and critical servers, Hawke
installed five HP Proliant series servers, density optimised to deliver a more
cost-effective, high-performance and scaleable architecture.
An IBM TotalStorage tape library replaced the multiple media tape devices for
data archiving, backup and disaster recovery, providing the reliability and
on-demand storage required to perform overnight backups.
Running behind the hardware was Veritas Netbackup DataCenter for data
protection, tape sharing and non-disruptive backup of mission-critical
applications. This has proven performance with linear tape-open (LTO) storage
and in large SAN configurations, with the ability to share and recover files
(and drives) across multiple servers.
The result of these carefully selected and installed components significantly
reduced backup time, made centralisation of storage easier, improved the total
cost of ownership, and increased network and application performance. The time
invested by Hawke in the proof of concept stage enabled it to deliver the
solution on time and to budget.
Conclusion
C&W/H&B’s new SAN with 2 terabytes of storage is integrated with its Lotus
Notes, Netware, Oracle and Windows servers. This has given the company a fast,
robust, resilient and scaleable centralised backup and restore environment for
mail, application, and file and print servers.
The total solution automated previously manual processes and has reduced the
load on Lotus Notes/Domino servers, consequently increasing productivity and
performance. Furthermore, C&W/H&B has secured a package that offers a simple
migration path to future technologies, such as SCSI, SANRAD and IP Storage.
Moving from single-attached tape devices to one central management unit has
reduced administration time and given C&W/H&B more control over its data. With a
tape library, it can also store data within the library for immediate recall.
“We have increased the success ratio on backups and now have the ability to back
up all of their systems centrally in five hours, which was impossible with the
old infrastructure,” Burke adds. “The library also enables us to replicate data
to perform same-day restores, rather than waiting for data to come back from
offsite storage.”
C&W/H&B continues to maintain a very strong relationship with Hawke and together
they are looking at a number of other projects.
“We have a great relationship with Hawke and have found them to be a very
reliable supplier, delivering everything on time,” says Burke. “Its expertise,
technical knowledge, and support throughout has been impressive.”
Key Facts
Increased manageability of IT infrastructure
Direct connectivity to all internal applications
Full overnight backup in five hours
All systems designed to allow for unlimited future storage growth and server
performance
Project completed on time and within budget
“Hawke did a great deal of groundwork arranging for us to speak to technical
people, visit sites, and test hardware. We worked in partnership with them to
create the optimum solution that best met our needs.” Joe Burke, infrastructure
support manager, C&W/H&B
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