United Biscuits With NetApp FAS3140

United Biscuits was founded in 1948 following the
merger of two Scottish family businesses: McVitie & Price and MacFarlane
Lang.

A branded-snack business, it produces recognised and loved sweet and savoury snacks, with products
ranging from biscuits and crackers to cakes and savoury items. United Biscuits
has an portfolio of brands including McVitie’s, Jacob’s, Carr’s,
McCoy’s, Hula Hoops, and KP. Now a player in the United Kingdom, France,
the Netherlands, Belgium, and Ireland, its products also have
worldwide appeal, and United Biscuits serves consumers around the globe.

The challenge:
Find a storage solution that would support
an
increasingly virtualised environment.
As a global operation, United Biscuits constantly
reviews its business operations. As part of
this ongoing assessment, the IT infrastructure had come under scrutiny.
"We wanted to make our IT services work harder," says Steve
Summersgill, Technical Services manager at United Biscuits. "And that
included virtualising more of our environment and deploying thin provisioning
as well as reexamining our disaster recovery and business continuity
options."

Over the years, United Biscuits had made a significant
investment in an IBM storage solution that was now proving expensive to expand
and operate within an increasingly virtualised environment. "The high cost
of maintenance of our existing system together with the requirement for
improved disaster recovery and our move towards increased virtualisation
offered us the opportunity to reevaluate our storage strategy," says
Summersgill.

The two main options appeared to be either retaining
the existing storage system and finding an alternative virtualised environment
to VMware, or ripping out and replacing the IBM storage solution in its
entirety.

In addition, the disaster recovery provision included
a cold standby site that, although robust and serviceable, could take up to two
days to fully commission and set up. "We wanted to provide instant
failover in the event of an emergency to ensure seamless business
continuity," says Summersgill.

One of the drivers was the requirement for an increase in storage capacity due to the implementation of a new
virtualised desktop project. "Rather than carry on down the same old route
of adding more drives to the existing system, this project gave us the opportunity
to do things better," says Summersgill.

The solution:
A V-Series controller and integrating
the existing SAN
into the new environment

After researching the market, United
Biscuits came up with a short list of three options: two ‘rip and replace’
proposals and a proposition from NetApp partner ANS to
use a V-Series controller and integrate the existing IBM SAN into the new
environment. "The ANS proposal not only protected our initial SAN
investment, it had the advantage of delivering the rich set of storage features
that we needed across the whole implementation," says Summersgill.

Business benefits:
Reduced costs, increased capacity,  greater
functionality
and flexibility within the storage service
The V-Series product line is a storage virtualisation
solution that delivers all the features and functionality of a NetApp
implementation while protecting existing SAN investments. With its
ability to manage third-party storage arrays, the NetApp V-Series allows United
Biscuits to use the functionality and power of the NetApp virtualised
solution, including thin provisioning, Snapshot copies, and deduplication,
across its new and existing storage, without the need to rip and replace.

ANS devised a solution for United Biscuits
that satisfied its long-term requirements for business continuity yet
could be implemented to meet the tight time scales demanded by the introduction
of the new virtualised desktop project, which was driving the demand for an increase in storage capacity. "ANS offered us an innovative
solution and, in conjunction with NetApp, produced an expert design very
quickly," says Summersgill.

To meet the demands for additional storage
capacity, a NetApp V3140 appliance that incorporated the existing SAN was
installed and commissioned at the main site. Phase two of the storage project
is the installation and configuration of a mirrored FAS3140 at a second site to
provide backup, redundancy, and failover in the event of an
emergency. "Redesigning and integrating a new storage platform can be a
massive project that is easy to underestimate," says Summersgill.
"However, NetApp and ANS have made the task much more manageable with a
two-phase implementation."

Installation and migration to the new system have
already proved to be easier than Summersgill’s team expected. No major problems
have occurred, and currently 50% of the data and most key applications have
been relocated onto the new NetApp appliance. The rest of the data will be
migrated when the second site is operational and replication has been
configured.

The IT team is delighted with the improvements within the virtualised server environment achieved through the
deduplication of data. Initially there were concerns about the performance of
the new NetApp system compared with the old ‘native’ system. These
fears have proved unfounded, and United Biscuits is impressed with the speed
and performance of the NetApp storage system, with its mix of new and legacy
drives making up the 35 terabytes of storage space.

Functioning as both a NAS gateway and a SAN
virtualisation engine, the V-Series has provided United Biscuits with a rich
set of storage features while unifying its storage provision into a single
platform. Snapshot copies are created at frequent intervals with almost no
performance impact, shortening backup windows and eliminating the need to
identify changed data. "The NetApp system is working exceedingly well for
us, especially in the VMware environment," says Summersgill. "One of
our ongoing projects will be to review our use of tape backup; having a NetApp
platform opens up the choices for us."

Suggested Pull Quote:
"The ANS V-Series proposal not only protected our
initial SAN investment, it had the advantage of delivering the rich set of
storage features that we needed across the whole implementation. ANS
offered us an innovative solution and, in conjunction with NetApp, produced an
expert design very quickly," Steve Summersgill.