Comic Relief Implements Compellent SAN on VMWare

Based in London, UK, Comic Relief has implemented a Compellent storage area network (SAN) and VMware platform to create a virtual storage and server environment.

As a result of deploying Compellent technologies such as thin provisioning, automated tiered storage and continuous snapshots, the charity has dramatically improved its IT asset utilisation. It also cut the number of physical servers by one fifth, while reducing the costs of powering, cooling and housing their servers – helping Comic Relief meet its environmental IT commitments.

Previously, Comic Relief’s backup data was held off-site on tapes and could take several hours to recover. Today, however, recovery has been reduced to minutes and just a few mouse clicks, using Compellent’s Data Instant Replay snapshots. In addition, the charity has deployed Compellent’s Automated Tiered Storage to automatically move less-frequently accessed data to lower-cost disks.

Comic Relief has increased asset utilisation by deploying Compellent’s thin provisioning technology to eliminate allocated but unused capacity across the network. The charity only uses physical disk space when data is written. This has provided a fast and environmentally sensitive way to scale its storage requirements in line with future data growth – enabling the charity to create virtual volumes of any size up front, and add new storage capacity as needed without having to shut down data access.

John Thompson, Comic Relief’s Head of IT, comments: "Compellent’s SAN has been instrumental in reducing our IT capital and operational costs. It also ensures that our systems are better protected from potential downtime and data loss. Compellent has provided us with an extremely cost-effective solution, ensuring that the maximum amount of profit is donated to our global initiatives. We therefore regard Compellent as an absolutely crucial partner in enabling us to adapt to rapid business growth and change – ensuring our long-term survival and continued success."

Andy Hardy, Compellent Managing Director of International Sales, concludes: "Organisations like Comic Relief are building flexible virtual data centres founded on Compellent storage virtualisation technologies and VMware server virtualisation solutions. Compellent, together with VMware has enabled Comic Relief to move towards an environmentally friendly storage and server infrastructure. Unlike in traditional SAN environments, the charity does not need to spend money on powering and cooling unused storage space."

The installation was carried out by Fordway Solutions, a Compellent partner, and one of the UK’s leading enterprise management, data storage, IP networking and IT infrastructure specialists.