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MELODY THAT PROVED SWEET MUSIC

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 4 - June 2007

Volkswagen Financial Services is enjoying a range of tangible cost benefits that already outweigh the initial cost of its new SANmelody solution

VWFS is one of the largest financial services companies in the UK, offering financial services products to around 800 automotive outlets of the Volkswagen Group, including Volkswagen, Audi, Bentley, SEAT, Skoda and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. VWFS employs 450 staff and loaned more than £1 billion of financial agreements in 2006.

VWFS is running two data centres in Milton Keynes supporting 450 internal staff and providing application support through to the UK retailer networks.

Compliance and other financial regulations make adherence to high availability and tight disaster recovery (DR) planning a necessity for the IT department.

Their previous DR plans involved two mirrored recovery sites, with continuous replication to support the networks 100 servers - all running their own SATA direct attached storage. The system was flawed, in that, if a failure occurred, each server had to be individually rebuilt. Also, with no management, VWFS had to allocate each server the correct amount of disk space.

"We recognised that immediate savings could be gained with a DataCore virtualised SAN," says Mike Duxbury, senior networking specialist, VWFS, "as it would only allocate the disk space that was needed and we could simply replace or plug in more disk; whereas, in the past, we've had to over-allocate disk space and partitioning requirements."

To meet their requirements of central management and auto recovery, Premier Computer Supplies tendered two HP servers, running DataCore's SANmelody 2.0 virtual infrastructure solution, that would robustly support Microsoft Virtual Server applications.

From a hardware perspective, SANmelody is truly agnostic, so VWFS decided that the existing HP MSA 20 SATA enclosures should be re-deployed within the SANmelody solution to hold the mirror volumes from the remote site and re-utilised all existing SATA drives. It was selected to virtualise the existing network storage, because of its auto recovery features and its ability to centrally provide capacity on demand, reducing administrative efforts and improving utilisation of existing capacity.

Duxbury notes that it wasn't long into the installation that SANmelody was put to the test, "As a result of disk failure, one server went offline, but SANmelody's auto-failover function kicked in, switching the servers to the mirrored site and began to seamlessly rebuild the volumes in the background. The failing server was rebuilt within minutes - all with minimal intervention from the team."

A few weeks later, SANmelody demonstrated its value again when a three-hour power failure breached the UPS and threatened the loss of all the servers at the second data centre site. But as soon as power resumed, SANmelody once again took over and automatically began to rebuild the volumes from the primary site. Within the first three months of operation, storage is easier to manage, with optimal utilisation of available disk and servers now highly available and better performing.

There are tangible cost benefits that are already outweighing the initial cost of the SANmelody solution itself, says VWFS. No longer does VWFS have to rely on costly local storage - the virtualised infrastructure has allowed blade servers (with half the price tag) to replace traditional servers. ST