NetApp Data ONTAP GX Chosen by CSR

NetApp announced that CSR, a designer of wireless devices, has greatly enhanced its IT performance, improved its disaster recovery capabilities, and consolidated its IT data center by moving all of its storage to NetApp platforms, with business applications on Data ONTAP 7G and critical chip design on NetApp Data ONTAP GX.

As a global leader in the wireless technology industry, CSR provides many products that are found throughout the world in wireless devices such as laptops, cell phones, and automotive and mobile GPS systems. In order to maintain its leadership position, CSR depends greatly on the innovation of its 800-strong worldwide engineering team that sets and adheres to stringent and aggressive product-development timelines. At the same time, CSR needs an IT infrastructure that is able to keep pace. CSR’s storage platform plays an integral role in the company’s IT infrastructure success because it must be able to store and manage the company’s intense flow of critical data while providing dependable and effective disaster recovery. CSR previously leveraged a mixed storage platform made up of systems from EMC, HP, and NetApp.

“With our high-performance Linux compute farm, we needed to identify a single storage platform that could work with us and scale to meet our ever-growing needs,” said David Mountford, vice president of Information Systems for CSR. “We also needed impeccable disaster recovery capabilities given the time-to-market demands that we live with. Even the smallest delay in a product development cycle can create problems. After weighing our options and looking at all of the major storage vendors, NetApp Data ONTAP GX was selected to provide the type of end-to-end solution that we needed to continue to grow our business.”

Following its nine-month vendor evaluation process, CSR decided to upgrade and expand its current NetApp estate to a set of clustered storage systems. It deployed two NetApp FAS3040 GX nodes and two NetApp FAS6070 GX nodes at each of its two Cambridge, UK sites. The performance and ability of this system enabled CSR to achieve significantly higher I/Os per second to a single data volume, something that the rest of the competition was unable to deliver. This ability allows CSR to spread data-intensive projects across multiple heads simultaneously, enabling the company to better scale its performance and capacity. As a result, CSR is now able to support multiple simultaneous tape-outs (when completed, specs for new chip designs are sent to manufacturing) while the previous architecture could support just one.

“The chips that CSR produces are becoming more and more complex, as some integrate not only Bluetooth but other functions including GPS, FM, Bluetooth low energy, and Wi-Fi. This complexity results in more complicated testing procedures,” said Mountford. “Now, every project consumes multiple terabytes of storage, and that will continue to increase along with the trend towards increased transistor density. With these types of requirements placed on our storage system, NetApp Data ONTAP GX was the logical solution to handle this workload; it not only gives us the ability to scale to meet increased demand, but also provides the flexibility to redistribute load across our cluster without any impact to the availability of the system.”

Another key benefit and deciding factor for CSR was the ability to provide effective and reliable disaster recovery without sacrificing any performance. Since its intellectual property is key to CSR’s success, the company needed a storage solution that would not only protect against natural disasters but also protect it from the potential failure of any given storage volume or head. With its Data ONTAP GX cluster spread across two sites, CSR is able to safely and easily mirror critical data and make it available from either site; the GX cluster remains available even under disaster conditions and is able to back up all of its engineering data in a third of the time previous solutions took.

Moving to a single storage platform has provided CSR with a more streamlined and efficient storage infrastructure. Managing its previous heterogeneous storage platform resulted in a long list of IT challenges, such as training CSR staff on each platform. CSR’s support team is now able to focus on a single storage platform and operating system, providing a higher level of service to the business. In addition, the solution allows CSR to work with one storage vendor for technical support and purchasing decisions.

“CSR is a great example of how NetApp Data ONTAP GX can help customers shorten their development cycles and speed business results,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing for NetApp. “By providing customers with a scale-out storage solution, NetApp is enabling them to accelerate product time to market, and improve development efficiency.”