London Borough of Hillingdon Deployed two Compellent SANs

Compellent announced that the London Borough of Hillingdon, one of the capital’s largest local authorities, has deployed two Compellent storage area networks (SANs) and a VMware virtual server environment to deal with its 100 percent year-on-year data growth. Key results of this local government implementation include savings of £20,000 a year by reducing power consumption from 34kWh to 1.1 kWh and additional annual savings of £50,000 by removing the need to expand the IT team. Today, Hillingdon runs 94 virtual servers on just three physical machines, a 97 percent reduction in server hardware.

 
Hillingdon’s legacy storage environment was proving to be a financial and power drain; management costs were increasing as it approached capacity, and high power consumption was an issue as there was no more power available for additional hardware. In addition, although the borough was storing terabytes of data, only 10 per cent could be considered mission-critical at any time. However, the other 90 per cent could not be moved to offline storage as it could be required at short notice to form the basis of key national government reports or to help solve questions about legacy projects.

Compellent’s automated tiered storage feature solved this problem by automatically moving the least used blocks of data to the lowest cost, highest density disk drives. By dynamically migrating infrequently accessed data from high-performance Fibre Channel disks to less expensive, energy-efficient SATA storage Hillingdon was able to save a further £6,500 in annual power costs.

Roger Bearpark, Assistant Head of ICT for the London Borough of Hillingdon, comments: “As a public sector organisation, Hillingdon is committed to driving sustainable, more environmentally friendly practices, and our green IT initiative enabled us to reduce the carbon footprint by 20 percent over 18 months. A significant part of this was achieved by replacing our disparate array of servers and storage hardware with a greener virtual environment using Compellent and VMware.”

These efficiencies are enhanced by Compellent’s thin provisioning software, which delivers the highest storage usage rates in the industry by eliminating the allocated, but unused capacity found in traditional storage arrays. This means Hillingdon was able to purchase less storage hardware up front and defer storage upgrades in line with actual business usage. It also saves on the floor space and electricity costs associated with keeping unused disks spinning.

In addition, Compellent’s Thin Import feature allowed Hillingdon to reduce its disk space requirements by 45 percent when compared to the capacity allocated on its previous SAN. The space reclamation process itself took only a third of the time that Hillingdon would otherwise have taken using traditional data migration methods.

Hillingdon also uses Compellent’s SAN to asynchronously replicate space-efficient, continuous snapshots between its two sites. This provides disaster recovery functionality at a fraction of the cost of other replication solutions. In addition, Enterprise Manager, Compellent’s enterprise-class storage resource management (SRM) software, automates the replication process and allows Hillingdon to manage both environments from a single console.

The replication solution has been extended to also provide disaster recovery for the local health authority, Hillingdon Primary Care Trust (PCT).  The PCT’s data is stored on the secondary SAN – the disaster recovery target for the borough – while the borough’s primary SAN acts as the backup site for the PCT’s data. Using Compellent’s point-and-click interface, Bearpark can automate failover and recovery between the two SANs as well as test disaster recovery.

In addition, Compellent’s automated chargeback feature allows Hillingdon to recover operating costs in the not-for-profit agreement with the PCT, and expects to start using the function to accurately charge its own departments for the storage they use.

Andy Hardy, Managing Director of International Sales, concludes: “Hillingdon’s innovative Compellent installations have contributed to our recent success at VMworld, where our SAN received a Gold Best of VMworld 2008 Award in the Hardware for Virtualisation category. It also demonstrates the full extent to which Compellent’s and VMware’s solutions deliver an integrated and easily-manageable server and storage environment.”

The whole integration solution was architected, designed and deployed by Fordway Solutions, a Compellent partner, and a UK’s enterprise management, data storage, IP networking and IT infrastructure specialist.