London Borough of Sutton Adopted DataCore

DataCore Software, announce that the London Borough of Sutton has adopted
DataCore’s storage vitualisation software to safeguard data.

A London’s residential area, the Borough is a choice for families
wishing to enjoy the leafy suburbs, safe environment and well maintained public
services. Schools are generally therefore popular and oversubscribed.

Centrally supporting the Borough’s 45 primary, special and
12 high schools IT environment, is Daniel Gale, Schools Network Manager, London
Borough of Sutton, responsible for providing a secure network
and central administration services for over 60,000 pupils and staff. Central
infrastructure services that the team provide include the protection, backup
and business continuity of all data relating to schools, pupils, coursework and
email.

Daniel’s was introduced to DataCore at a seminar run by
Vcentral,
a DataCore reseller specialising in all areas of virtualisation, who
showed DataCore running in conjunction with VMware, highlighting the
benefits a total virtualised infrastructure could bring. Design of a
full
virtualised solution followed including recommendations for ongoing
training, support
and reutilisation of hardware. Previously, the Borough had been running a
SAN. The configuration consisted of two administration
Microsoft Cluster Server nodes together with a pair of Active Directory
Servers, all of which provided failover for the local pool of data.

This
configuration was great for storage provisioning and adequate for business
continuity but to achieve complete disaster recovery, Daniel knew that he
needed to employ DataCore’s dual node storage virtualisation software running
outside of the local cluster. This would provide the redundant mirroring
configuration to avoid a single point of failure and achieve a highly
available, highly resilient, stable SAN solution with true disaster recovery.

Of further concern was that the existing MS Cluster configuration was over five
years old and therefore slow and less reliable than the Team would have
liked. With little budget to spend on
additional hardware and keen to reutilise what was already in the data centre,
Vcentral reassuringly confirmed that they could expand the environment by
simply adding DataCore virtualisation software to empower their existing HP MSA
1000 hardware together with deployment of two HP DL380 G5 to house the two
DataCore powered nodes to manage their storage across separate sites.

The DataCore solution: Reutilisation brings Recovery
Without delay, Vcentral began work on replacing the ageing
cluster. The team factored in extra
capacity to allow for the increase in student and network usage and recommended
a three virtual host solution across the data centre – two in the Borough’s
secondary education offices in Carshalton and one in the civic offices in
central Sutton empowering Disaster Recovery,
all connected by fibre. VMware’s
VSphere was selected as the server virtualisation platform, along with VMware
Advanced Acceleration kit running on the six VMs. The existing HP MSA 1000 SATA
enclosures were redeployed to hold the mirror volumes from the remote site
together with two HP DL380 G5 to house the DataCore software. Whilst at the
Sutton Disaster Recovery site, the Borough opted for the purchase of a HP
ML370.

Results: Straight talking storage allocation
One of the results of deployment means that the
central administration team’s procurement of additional disk has
decreased. Previously the Borough had to speculate up front how much
disk was
required – hard to predict across such a large environment, hence the
ability
to upscale disk ‘as and when required’ was a buying criteria for the
Borough. 

DataCore did not care at all which type of disk was in
place; from SAS to external iSCSI arrays to SATA, (even a test USB device was
put through its paces and strained to the maximum!).This acceptance of any type
of disk allows the Borough to literally add as they go and not have to over
estimate how much disk is required each year. Valuable when you think how the
cost of disk is driven down over time.
Equally valuable is the way DataCore’s thin provisioning means you never
run out of disk – all disk is in actual fact allocated, but through thin
provisioning, even if there is unprecedented demand spike, Daniel knows that he
can quickly reallocate and assign spare disk as and when required from the central
storage pool so there is no need to load up-front.

"In the past we had no
choice but to over-allocate disk space and partitions; with the dual DataCore
configuration, we no longer needed to factor in the ‘what if’ scenario, now we
simply plug in cheap additional disk when it’s needed," said Daniel.

Adding new volumes in minutes
and maintenance of
servers  online:
Now provisioning new storage, adding new machines and
maintaining servers is a relatively process avoiding downtime.
DataCore adds one new network managed volume that creates instant appearances
across all hosts. Maintenance can also be done without interference. The system
is paused then resynchronised, but there is no disruption as the DataCore
software controls and routes the flow of data between the two, providing fault
tolerance and resilience to the servers’ applications.

Failures are no longer Failures, but mere ‘glitches’:
Across a weekend, a power outage breached the UPS window,
yet when power was reconnected, the DataCore virtualisation server simply
resumed and automatically re-synched with its partner with nodisruption to
users or inevitable loss of pupil data. DataCore’s software automatically
resumed the job of rebuilding applications.

Daniel concludes: "We have
been using DataCore now for some years, so we have a great track record with
the product. However what the new enhanced environment actually gives us is
total peace of mind whether we want add, maintain or recover, it simply gets on
with job and remains totally bullet proof. That equates to total
confidence."