Central & Cecil Selecting Scale Computing

Central & Cecil was founded in 1926 and is committed to
providing housing and care for a wide range of people in London,
Berkshire, Luton and the Midlands. Its
responsibilities include contributing to housing the elderly, the homeless and
others with special support needs as well as providing access to personal
development, arts and education programmes. These services are managed directly
and in partnership with local specialist agencies.

The company has experienced growth, with mergers including Central London Housing Trust in 1993, Hampstead Old People’s
Housing Trust in 1996 and the transfer of three residential care homes from the
London Borough of Merton. In 2009, Central & Cecil also merged with Cara
Irish Housing Association and took over management of 221 units of support
housing.

As a result of frequent
mergers with similar organisations, Central & Cecil found itself in need of
a centralised storage solution that would enable it to share data across
multiple locations, virtualise their environment, and increase storage capacity
in response to future growth. To meet these requirements Central & Cecil
selected storage from Scale Computing.

"Due to the
simplicity of the integration across our entire organisation, we are already
looking to expand and accelerate our storage provision as part of our wider
virtualisation programme," said Omer
Zaim, head of IT, Central & Cecil.

• Housing and
  wellness company managing 40+ housing sites
• Seeking to unify diverse IT environment from mergers
• Initial
  purchase of 3TB scale-out storage cluster
• 3TB addition
  to host server virtualisation
• 3TB addition planned for remote replication

• Estimated 50
  percent operational cost savings from storage and virtualisation project

Challenge
The growth caused by these mergers raised significant
integration challenges for Central & Cecil. In October 2010, Central &
Cecil, working with technology consulting company IT Protocol, set to address
the disparate approach to IT that had resulted from multiple mergers. The goal
of the project was to reduce operating costs and achieve seamless management of
the expanding organisation’s IT environment. The first step in the project was
to address storage and server challenges in the environment – such as growing
amounts of VMs and data – by deploying server virtualisation along with a new
storage platform to host the virtualisation.

"Our growing
responsibilities to the community and rapid expansion across a number of UK sites meant
that we needed a flexible and scalable storage solution that could cope with
our changing demands and support our move into a virtualised
environment," said Omer Zaim.

Solution
As recommended by IT Protocol, Central & Cecil evaluated
a unified, scale-out storage cluster from Scale Computing. Unified storage
would allow Central & Cecil to consolidate their NAS and SAN storage needs
onto a single storage system with the seamless management they sought.

The consolidation of NAS and SAN data onto a single system
highlighted the need for performance in the storage. Omer Zaim recognised the
inherent performance and economy advantages that a scale-out architecture would
provide Central & Cecil:

"As opposed to scale-up storage, Scale’s storage
solutions are scale-out, which enables our organisation to buy storage as and
when we need it," said Omer Zaim. "This allows us to modernise our
system and implement a better performing and more efficient storage solution
that is quick and easy to deploy."

Every Scale Computing storage cluster is powered by Scale’s
own Intelligent Clustered Operating System (ICOS) technology. A cluster is
comprised of three or more storage nodes working together to present a single
storage pool. For Central & Cecil, an initial 3TB of
usable storage was quickly deployed at the Waterloo
site in London,
with the ability to add additional capacity in increments as small as 1TB of usable
storage per node.

In fact, Central & Cecil soon added 3TB to the cluster
by purchasing three additional 1TB nodes. This provided additional capacity,
extra caching and three additional network data paths to the storage. Central
& Cecil also has the freedom to add nodes of various sizes to the cluster
if desired. The additional 3TB of storage served a Citrix farm and other
production application servers.

"The shared central storage solution offered the
breadth to support the organisation’s expansion plans, increase control,
support our virtualisation, was quick to deploy and significantly cheaper than
alternative solutions on the market. We estimate that through these changes our
outlay will be significantly lower, estimating a saving of 50 percent through
the avoidance of replacement costs," said Omer Zaim.

The next stage of the project will add another 3TB of
storage at a secondary site and leverage snapshots and replication of the
storage cluster to a second cluster at the remote office, a feature available
at no extra charge.

Benefits
The power of Scale Computing storage is harnessed with ICOS
software that makes setup and management of the storage easy. Setup of CIFS
shares, NFS shares, and iSCSI LUNs is completed in minutes using a web-based GUI. The intuitive GUI also provides storage
dashboards with monitoring of storage and capacity status.

"We have found the solution extremely easy to use and
the fast and simple deployment has diminished down time and completely avoided
the need for intensive and time consuming training for our staff," said
Zaim. "Due to the simplicity of the integration across our entire
organisation, we are already looking to expand and accelerate our storage
provision as part of our wider virtualisation programme."

Scale Computing clusters deliver an accessible storage
platform, allowing Central & Cecil to streamline storage management across
the country and expand their storage system as the growth of their company
requires all without the concern of exhausting storage performance down the
road and facing large new capital investments.