Royal Horticultural Society Deploys 12TB SAN from Compellent

The Royal
Horticultural Society (RHS), the UK’s most influential gardening
charity, now has a greener data storage infrastructure as well as lower
storage-related capital and operating costs following the deployment of
two energy-efficient storage area networks (SANs) from Compellent. The
charity also benefits from a more robust and proactive disaster
recovery platform for its library of over 200,000 high resolution
horticultural images, with server recovery times reduced from 12 days
to 24 hours.

The RHS requires its IT infrastructure, which includes 40 servers
and 600 PCs, to be fully operational at all times so that members can
gain entry to its gardens, new membership applications can be handled,
transactions at the Society’s shops can be processed and suppliers can
be paid. The IT infrastructure, which was installed by Fordway, one of
Compellent’s UK channel partners, plays a key role in the successful
organization and management of the RHS flower shows – including the
Society’s annual flagship events at Chelsea, Hampton Court Palace and
Tatton Park.

Commenting on Compellent’s technology, Phillip Gladwin, IT Security
and Operations Manager, at the RHS, said: "It’s fast, effective and
right at the cutting edge – and is incredibly easy to manage. It also
offers us immediate and long term cost savings, while helping us do our
bit for the environment."

The Society selected a 12 TB Compellent SAN featuring automated
tiered storage and thin provisioning for its primary London data center
comprising two controllers with 2.5 TB of high-performance Fibre
Channel (FC) capacity and 9.5 TB of low-cost SATA capacity. A second
Compellent SAN, located approximately a mile away, also had two
controllers but the entire 12TB capacity was made up only with low-cost
SATA drives. Initially, all images were loaded onto the high-speed FC
drives on the primary SAN. As usage patterns emerged, the system
automatically moved the least accessed images to the lower cost SATA
drives, and then back up to the faster drives if they became more
popular so that they could be accessed and downloaded more quickly. The
entire solution saved the RHS a considerable amount of money and also
contributed to a greener storage solution, as SATA drives require much
less power than FC drives.

Going forward, the Society plans to connect around 30 of its servers
to the SAN and move toward a virtual environment in order to ensure a
more effective level of server utilization. The RHS will continue to
pool all server and storage resources, so the Compellent story at the
Royal Horticultural Society will continue to blossom for many years to
come.

"By deploying a Compellent SAN, organizations are able to cut the
short and longer term costs associated with data storage, while also
reducing the carbon footprint of their IT assets," said Bruce Kornfeld,
vice president of marketing for Compellent. "The RHS also benefited
from our automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and continuous
snapshot technologies, which strengthened its disaster recovery
capabilities without the complexity and time taken by more traditional
SAN infrastructures."

The Royal
Horticultural Society (RHS)

Compellent