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SUCCESS SHINES THROUGH

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 5 - August 2007

Truck-Lite, the world's largest commercial vehicle lighting company, is illuminating its storage through the use of virtualisation

Faced with rapidly growing data volumes - and the desire to robustly protect business-critical data in the wake of lessons learned from the Buncefield Oil disaster - Truck-Lite set out to find an effective, reliable storage and disaster recovery solution. And the path chosen to provide higher utilisation of existing resources, thin provisioning and disaster recovery for the company's European operations was the storage virtualisation one.

The burgeoning level of data that had to be managed reflects Truck-Lite Europe's role as part of a vast and complex global operation. In fact, it is the largest commercial vehicle lighting company in the world, with a customer base that includes Volvo, Daimler Chrysler, Scania, Ford, GM and JCB. Formerly known as Flexible Lamps and acquired by Truck-Lite Co. in November 2006, the merged organisation is a multi-billion pound operation, with several thousand employees mainly involved in manufacturing. Early in 2007, it was decided that the former Flexible Lamps' data-centre would become the European data centre for Truck-Lite.
The IT department manages 650 internal customers, with a staff of three, from a data centre based in Harlow's main administration building. A separate disaster recovery site is based within a manufacturing facility that houses the disaster recovery communications room 300m away, connected via a fibre link.

Data is held across 10 Windows servers, each of which houses its own data via direct attached storage (DAS). The enterprise resource planning (ERP) system Unison is run on a Sun Solaris server, again with its critical ERP data held in isolation via its own DAS. With so many servers to manage within a mixed environment, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage storage requirements without incurring downtime and extra costs.

"Like so many other manufacturers in the UK, we were forced to catapult disaster recovery to the top of the priority list in the wake of the Buncefield Oil inferno last year, forcing us to fully explore 'what-if worse-case' scenarios," says Mark Aylwin, IT support team leader, Truck-Lite Europe.

Although not an obvious terrorist, flooding or hazard risk, Buncefield acutely demonstrated that external forces outside of an organisations' control can dramatically affect a business, forcing IT departments to commence watertight disaster recovery planning procedures.

Added to this necessity was the growing inflexibility and management headaches provided by the DAS that only allowed access to a finite amount of pre-allocated disk. Frustratingly, the IT department could see that some servers had plenty of free disk (anything up to 25% of free disk space was residing idle on other servers), yet they were unable to apportion this to needy servers. And so it became apparent that the automated management of capacity provisioning and the auto-recovery/auto-failover data protection offered by an intelligent virtualised storage area network (SAN) could hold the answer to both problems.

At this stage of scoping, Truck-Lite IT's department contacted five partners. The resultant proposed solutions that came back were, according to Truck-Lite Europe, varied and prohibitively expensive. "Providing a cost-effective DR strategy in a mixed Solaris/Windows environment seemed to be a challenge," says Mark Aylwin, IT support team leader, Truck-Lite Europe. "The Sun partners recommended their Solaris Solution; the HP houses recommended their solution for Windows; but the initial cost estimates for a mixed environment were accompanied by what was too high a price tag - beyond what a medium-sized business could bear."

The alternative considered was to outsource the problem, using an external provider who would restore servers and backups, should an outage happen. "But the problem here was that, at best, the data would be 24 hours out of date and they would always lose one days' business-critical data…and that was the best-case scenario," he adds.

So when New Datum (a new partner for Truck-Lite) proposed a combination of Virtual Iron as the virtual server platform - with two DataCore SANmelody 2.0 Dell Windows 2003 servers providing synchronous mirroring and auto failover as the DR solution - the IT department was immediately impressed with the low price tag and the potential cost savings it could make over the alternative proposals. But, most importantly, it was compelled by the flexibility of the solution being truly agnostic - both for past and future investments.

The DataCore SANmelody option means Truck-Lite is not bound to a particular hardware provider for servers, disk, licences or upgrades. The company can have the flexibility of choice for its current mixed environment, now and in the future.

Truck-Lite considered options provided by all the major server virtualisation providers, it states, but was impressed by the very attractive pricing structure and ease of migration promised in the transition from traditional server to virtual server using Virtual Iron.

"As for SANmelody complementing Virtual Iron, again its agnostic approach meant it would robustly support all major server virtualisation applications," Alwyn comments.

Also, when it comes to simplifying management and optimising storage capacity, because of the way in which SANmelody provides capacity upon demand from a central storage pool, Aylwin and his team have been able to immediately release and reutilise the previously 25% redundant server storage space.

With the SAN virtualised solution, Aylwin and his IT colleagues feel management has been handed back into their control, allowing them to use resources flexibly and agilely to gain higher storage capacity, without lock-in to any one vendor.

And what of the disaster recovery capabilities of the virtualised SAN? "Luckily, after only a few weeks in production, we haven't had cause to do a live full-scale DR as yet," comments Aylwin. "But, in terms of unplanned downtime, having applications and servers down for a morning or day is now a thing of the past. This is especially important for our ERP system, which sits on a Sun box and used to lack needed protection; now that it's virtualised using DataCore, it really isn't an issue."

From a management perspective, Truck-Lite Europe have dramatically improved its data protection service level agreements, and set the stage for further hardware savings and virtualisation across the organisation. ST