Winchester City Council, Lancaster University and ZSP-Haina Choose Dell

As data storage requirements are expected to grow by a factor of ten between 2006 and 2011, according to IDC, organisations are turning to storage solutions and consulting services from Dell to simplify the overall management of their infrastructures, leading to more robust business continuity capabilities, reduced management overhead and significant cost savings. Recently, Dell has worked with Winchester City Council, Lancaster University and German hospital ZSP-Haina to deploy tailored storage solutions that meet their immediate and future business demands.

“Storage growth will outpace overall IT growth during the current economic climate; therefore, it is more important than ever for companies to implement storage solutions that are simple to deploy and manage, capable of delivering advanced benefits to support the business and, of course, affordable for companies of all sizes,” said Robin Kuepers, Head of Storage, EMEA, Dell. “To ensure that companies make smart storage investments no matter which protocol of storage they prefer, Dell has heavily invested in R&D to develop best-of-breed solutions for both Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage. We also encourage our customers to use both of these technologies together if required to meet growth needs and SLAs at a lower cost; this will be further facilitated with the wider deployment and acceptance of 10Gbit Ethernet, which is expected to be prevalent in 2009,” continued Kuepers.
 
Storing up Savings with Dell
Winchester City Council found that management of its fast-growing server infrastructure was time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the distributed storage environment could not scale to accommodate a new Electronic Document Records Management System (EDRMS).

To meet business requirements, the council looked to Dell Consulting Services to consolidate its server infrastructure by introducing a scalable virtual environment based on Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers and a Dell EMC CX3-20C SAN storage array. With this consolidated infrastructure, the council has simplified operations across its business, and with the EDRMS solution in place, it has been able to streamline operations even further. The CX3-20C SAN also provided Winchester City Council with a scalable solution that will grow in line with the council’s future requirements. “Scalability was really important for us because we’re always adding new applications and services as we strive to respond to public demand. The flexible SAN solution will give us room to grow and develop over time,” said Sheila Davidge, head of information and management technology.
 
Lancaster University wanted to reduce its carbon footprint while meeting the need for increased computing services across the campus.

The university also looked to create an IT infrastructure that better supported business continuity; it had been relying on direct attached storage (DAS) and wanted to move towards a Storage Area Network (SAN) environment to centralise data for easy management and increased levels of security. With Dell, Lancaster University rolled out a virtualised environment that included Dell PowerEdge servers running VMware software; when it wanted to expand the environment for further cost savings and business continuity, a Dell EMC CX3-10C SAN was added. “One strength of the Dell/EMC solution was that it provided the option of testing Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity. As a result, we could start building a best-practice IT infrastructure tailored to the workload of the application,” said Dr. Matt Storey, Systems Technical Coordinator, Information Systems Services. “Dell storage consultants played a key role in finding the right shared storage solution for us. During our initial meetings, it was clear they understood our business model and aims.”
 
German hospital Zentrums für Soziale Psychiatrie-Haina wanted to maximise the benefits of its virtualised server infrastructure to improve its data protection and recovery capabilities.

The IT team decided to replace its direct attached storage with a Dell EqualLogic SAN comprised of two PS5000XV arrays attached to the existing PowerEdge 2950 servers. The SAN stores all data, giving the IT team a single interface for storage management tasks, automated data protection and seamless modular expansion to accommodate growth. A second EqualLogic SAN with a high capacity PS5000E array is located offsite for disaster recovery. According to Jörg Riether, IT manager at ZSP Haina, “Simplicity, scalability and protection were our main objectives. The EqualLogic line is a dynamic virtual storage solution with a simple user interface that helps us add servers easily in just a few minutes and offers a straightforward purchasing model. What’s more, the SANs automatically balance workloads to ensure optimised performance.” The team was also reassured by the long history of success other companies have had with EqualLogic SANs and VMware , alongside the strong strategic alliance between VMware and Dell.