Anite Has Deployed Virtual SAN Appliance From LeftHand Networks

LeftHand Networks announced
that Anite, an IT services and system integration company, has deployed
LeftHand Networks’ Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) in two of its data
centers using a VMware virtual server environment.

Based in the United Kingdom, Anite is an international software and
solutions company whose primary business is the provision of
industry-specific solutions for wireless telecoms, public sector and
travel markets.

“Historically Anite has had little islands of IT,” said Jeremy Moss,
group IT director for Anite. “We run some fairly standard business
applications, including customer support systems.”  

The organization had too many servers and disparate storage silos.
“With so many servers and storage silos, the data centers were too
complex and inefficient,” noted Moss. “We needed to streamline our
operations for both cost and efficiency, and decided to move to VMware
for server virtualization.”

With a virtualized environment, the existing silo-type storage
infrastructure was no longer feasible.  Anite wanted to implement the
high availability features of VMware Infrastructure 3 that require the
resiliency and data protection that comes with highly available
storage.  Server virtualization gave Anite potential server resiliency
advantages but it required storage shared between the servers.

Anite identified LeftHand Networks and its Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) for VMware ESX,
a full-featured, virtual iSCSI SAN, as a potential answer. Powered by
LeftHand Networks SAN/iQ storage software, the VSA provides complete
SAN management functionality through the VMware ESX Server. By
virtualizing the internal disk capacity of the VMware ESX host server
and clustering the storage across multiple VMware ESX hosts, LeftHand’s
VSA provides data protection and high availability and eliminates the
need for external shared storage, which is otherwise necessary to
implement the advanced features of VMware Infrastructure.

In-flight Testing
Recently Moss test-drove LeftHand’s VSA: “I was on a business trip to
Korea. On the way back I installed two nodes on my laptop. In less than
an hour it was up and running.” While other passengers read magazines and watched movies, Moss
installed and configured a 2-node test SAN on his laptop. It was that
straightforward, and very beneficial. “It was extremely useful to help
me understand what the technical team was so excited about,” stated
Moss.On his return to the United Kingdom, Moss conducted a test phase
comparing LeftHand Networks’ VSA and a Network Appliance product.
LeftHand’s VSA could be integrated into Anite’s Backup Exec regime,
which was a significant advantage. LeftHand Networks quickly became
Anite’s preferred choice as its shared storage solution provider.

Anite has a total of 16 LeftHand Networks storage nodes in eight
paired clusters for resilience, providing 60 terabytes of capacity.
LeftHand Networks storage nodes will be rolled out across additional
Anite sites along with VMware ESX Server clusters over the next few
months.

LeftHand Networks

Anite Group Plc