• Home
• Articles Archive
• Features List

• Media Pack
• Contact Us
• Subscribe

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 9, Issue 6- September 2009

BRITANNIA BUILDING SOCIETY IS IMPROVING WORKFLOWS AND SIMPLIFYING STORAGE MANAGEMENT WITH NEXT-GENERATION LSI STORAGE TECHNOLOGY

Around 80% of the environment involved in this upgrade project is used for testing and development purposes, the main function of the system being to snapshot volumes containing Oracle databases. In 2004, Britannia had installed the LSI StoreAge SVM (Storage Virtualization Manager) on its support SAN, with a StoreAge multiView software licence for creating low capacity snapshots.

This solution offered the building society a wide range of benefits that includes a flexible and scalable storage infrastructure with improved workflows, simplicity in storage management and also improved IT productivity.

BUSINESS NEED

Prior to the upgrade, each snapshot or view was taking 5% of the storage space of the source volume and, at this time, Britannia felt that it still had various single points of failure, due to the initial design of a test-only environment. Furthermore, some of its existing hardware was end of life and needed replacing.

Due to the success of the original test and development environment, together with the growing need for business services, Britannia decided to implement a new, highly resilient infrastructure, using the latest SVM software release. This would deliver further benefits to the organisation, including centralised management, user level security of the new user interface, simpler host connectivity, increased scalability and greater number of snapshot support across the existing environment.

Britannia was ultimately aiming for better speed, scalability and availability with failover capabilities, in order to meet the increasing demands of its testing and development environment.

The solution proposed by Esteem Systems was the Advanced Data Services Solution (ADSS) Storage Virtualization Platform, a customer-ready architected system, providing advanced data management services. The ADSS is a bundled configuration that integrates the LSI SVM software with the Sun Storage 6000 family modular disk systems, all racked in a turnkey solution. Esteem, a preferred partner of Britannia for a number of years, sought to ensure that the solution delivered not only in the short-term, but also satisfied Britannia's projected growth requirements.

CACHE THROUGHPUT

The Sun Storage 6540 dual active controllers used in this solution provide a cache throughput of more than 575,000 IOPs per second and employ a true back- end switched architecture to the disks, thus enabling better troubleshooting and performance.

The Sun 6540 controller can scale to support 224 Fibre Channel (FC) or SATA disks, or an intermix of both, within the same tray, providing good scalability to meet current and future needs. This configuration further allows for Britannia to offer a tiered storage approach to its data storage requirements and the use of 4Gb/s FC disks also provides end-to-end 4Gb/s performance.

Improvements to the SVM redirect on write snapshot capability have given Britannia ultimate flexibility and scalability, without the need to purchase additional Data Path Module (DPM) hardware. It has enabled the organisation to present multiple copies of databases in excess of 1TB to multiple hosts, while using only a fraction of the provisioned storage. They are now able to deliver more Oracle instances, without having to purchase significant amounts of additional storage.

The benefits of low capacity snapshots provided by the SVM have reduced the amount of storage that Britannia needs in order to scale, in comparison with its previous backup and restore mechanism. The ability to manipulate data-ondemand has brought massive financial benefits to the company, while reducing its carbon footprint, when set against traditional methods of storage provisioning.

The next stage was for the LSI StoreAge SVM software to be installed into the production SAN and made available to a larger part of the Britannia estate, which covers multiple storage vendors and operating systems. VMware had been identified as a key strategy, moving forward. The whole environment was also now to be replicated at the disaster recovery (DR) site 20 miles away, involving multiple storage systems. In order to meet its DR requirements, Britannia added features of SVM to an existing disk subsystem, while Sun supplied two 16-port DPMs. The ability to replicate the storage to an offsite DR location has enabled Britannia to meet regulatory compliance and to test upgrades, without the need to take the primary site offline.

SMOOTH IMPLEMENTATION

Meticulous planning and testing prior to the environment's migration, together with close collaboration between the various teams, ensured a smooth and fast implementation, with minimal disruption to daily business. Making sure that the

environment was available to the business for various projects, without disrupting production reports, required carefully scheduled downtime for migration, with less critical environments being migrated and tested first.

The use of DPMs (Data Path Modules) has enabled Britannia to utilise native Solaris multipath drivers, while maintaining all of the advanced features via the advanced scripting system developed in-house, based around the SVM SANAPI CLI. This has reduced the need to update drivers or agents on the host, thus increasing application uptime and simplifying the support structure.

In all, Britannia now utilises its storage assets better and enjoys high availability, failover capability and the ability to add more storage, without disrupting its users. Each snapshot or view now typically takes 0.5GB of storage space, and the user- friendly SVM client GUI offers centralised monitoring and better control of each environment.