Ports of Auckland Embarks DataCore

DataCore Software announced that Ports of Auckland, New Zealand’s port company, employs DataCore SANsymphony storage virtualization software to create virtual storage infrastructure that supports the company’s server virtualization environment and its business model. 

"With DataCore, we have seen the benefits first-hand of improved uptime and being able to do operational maintenance without affecting our business," said Craig Beetlestone, lead systems engineer at Ports of Auckland. "This gives us peace of mind. We’re also getting better utilization out of our storage hardware, and need less of it to achieve greater performance. With DataCore in place, our performance has been nothing short of phenomenal."

"Looking forward, it’s good knowing that SANsymphony’s advanced storage virtualization features stay in place even as the hardware underneath changes. There’s none of the throw away we’ve experienced in the past when the functional intelligence was buried in the devices."

Shipping and Logistics Demand
High Availability 24/7 Operations.
Ports of Auckland provides a range of cargo handling and logistics services which need to operate day and night to serve New Zealand’s international trade and shipping needs. The server infrastructure at Ports of Auckland is virtualized, but its aging Storage Area Network (SAN) was disrupting IT processing at critical hours. Downtime for physical equipment maintenance as well as expansions and upgrades prevented them from attaining the high availability demanded by a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week port operation. By deploying DataCore SANsymphony, the IT team is now able to keep applications running while switching out equipment with a few minutes’ notice.

"The ports have to efficiently ship, distribute and manage the extreme volume of cargo and materials each day; this makes it critical that their systems and networks are reliable and available at all times. Furthermore, they have discovered that the expertise required to upgrade and adopt cutting-edge IT systems is a considerable challenge," said Peter Thompson, managing director of APAC at DataCore Software. "By leveraging DataCore’s storage virtualization software and moving to a shared pool of storage, Ports of Auckland has realized greater efficiency and business continuity as well as the ability to quickly react to new and expanding workloads placed on its systems."

Hardware Choices Become Secondary
with VMware and DataCore.
Ports of Auckland was an early adopter of server virtualization and today 95 percent of its server infrastructure is virtualized. But it was running into the problem that many companies with virtualized environments encounter: its rigid SAN could not keep up with the variable demands required of a highly-virtualized environment.

Because SANsymphony synchronously mirrors the storage at both sites and automatically routes I/O requests to the appropriate hardware regardless of where it is, the Ports of Auckland’s IT staff no longer has to worry about site outages. In addition, just as server virtualization improves CPU utilization, SANsymphony storage virtualization improves disk space utilization through thin provisioning. They now create new virtual disks from the storage pool in seconds, and the software takes up the space actually being written to.

The new storage infrastructure delivers several benefits for Ports of Auckland: including what Beetlestone describes as ‘no-panic’ business continuity and seamless maintenance, better performance, improved storage utilization and long term cost savings.

Perhaps the biggest benefit Ports of Auckland has seen from deploying DataCore SANsymphony storage virtualization software is the confidence it gives the company and the IT team that they are now in control of the company’s infrastructure.

"One of the things that drew me personally to SANsymphony was that it is software," continued Beetlestone. "With SANsymphony, we buy it once. We own it. And we can swap out the box that it runs on at will as well as the underlying disks. That’s a big bonus. It can easily save us $100,000 or more when we go to the next generation of hardware."