Duplo Turns to Coraid EtherDrive

Coraid Inc., announced that Duplo International has deployed Coraid
EtherDrive technology to build a shared storage solution for a Microsoft Hyper-V environment.

The result is an
Ethernet-based, enterprise-level SAN that out-performs any Fibre Channel and
iSCSI alternatives, at a fraction of the cost. 

Selling in 108 countries worldwide Duplo International
provides finishing and printing equipment to all types of print operations
across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Until Q1 2011 its IT infrastructure included individual physical servers with
internal DAS. However the utilisation of these
servers was only reaching 10%-15% indicating an opportunity to reclaim capital
expense and to reduce power and cooling costs. As a result the IT department
decided to virtualise the servers in order to drive up utilisation and
streamline the infrastructure.

On the storage side this change meant that Duplo
needed a technology that would integrate with the new Microsoft Hyper-V
platform while being easy to manage and scale.

"We knew that server virtualisation would help us
reduce our spend. However it would require a shared storage environment and our
concern was that this would be so expensive that it would negate our server
consolidation savings," said Glyn Nutting, Financial Director at Duplo
International.

Duplo turned to Axis  Firsts, a UK-based provider of IT
solutions and Coraid Gold Partner, to help design the shared storage
architecture.

Upon investigation, both parties agreed that a Fibre
Channel-based infrastructure would be too expensive and complex, but Duplo was
not prepared to sacrifice performance by deploying iSCSI. Coraid’s Ethernet SAN
technology leverages ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) to provide a high-performance,
scalable architecture built with off-the-shelf, affordable hardware; Axis First
therefore recommended a no-single-point-of-failure architecture centred around
two Coraid’s EtherDrive SRX2800
16-disk Ethernet SAN arrays and two VSX2500
SAN virtualisation appliances and connected these to the customer’s Hyper-v R2
infrastructure running over 1 GB Ethernet network. Each Hyper-V server featured
two HBAs connected to redundant Ethernet switches which were in turn connected
to the arrays and the appliances. In addition the data was mirrored between the
two SRX2800 systems to provide data protection. This design ensured
that the failure of any one component would not result in disruption to the
service.

"With the Duplo team we tested every aspect of the
Coraid systems; we even pulled power cables, but everything continued to work
perfectly," said t Nick Dixon, Technologies Sales Director, at Axis First.
"The customer had a very clear and demanding brief for us and thanks to
Coraid we ticked all the boxes."

Further proof of the power of a no-single-point-of-failure
design came as Duplo was migrating its Exchange mailbox data to the new
arrays. When a switch configuration
issue required one VSX and one SRX systems to be taken briefly off line, the
data mirror kicked in without any disruption to the migration.

Dixon
continues: "We initially looked at Coraid because of the low TCO but we
were then blown away by the performance and the simplicity. We have been able
to deploy enterprise-class features with a midrange budget; the Coraid solution
came at less than half the cost of a similar-performance Fibre Channel
environment."

"By leveraging Ethernet as a storage protocol we
eliminate the need for costly and time-consuming training for our end
users," said Marcos Burnett, EMEA Sales Director, at Coraid. "Fibre
Channel is fast but costly, iSCSI is affordable but slow; Ethernet SAN
eliminates that trade off, offering the best performance and the lowest cost of
ownership. What’s not to like?"