Dot Hill Provides Virtualisation for Grundon Waste Management

Dot
Hill Systems Corp. announced that Grundon Waste
Management Limited, a privately-owned waste management group in the UK,
has selected Dot Hill’s
AssuredSAN 5730, as the flagship system in its 4GB FC external networked
storage range, to benefit from performance and storage
expansion in a virtualised environment. 

With over 700 employees across 16
sites, the Grundon IT infrastructure is under pressure to provide
service delivery for both staff and customers while retaining the capability to
scale as performance and capacity needs grow.

“One key focus is the reduction of physical, paper
storage across all areas of the business,” explains Steve Short, ICT
Manager at Grundon.

Although compliance
requires Grundon to keep some hard copy documents, wherever possible the
company tries to store electronic content only. Several sites have scanners
coupled to a new document management system (DMS) located at the head quarters
data centre and used for document storage, that is managed by Short and his
team.

“With an initial input of 30GB per week our DMS soon started to exceed
the storage capacity of our storage arrays, so we needed to find a solution
with greater capacity and performance,” added Short.

Grundon started to look at a number of external storage
arrays which would leverage the performance of the company’s existing 4Gb FC infrastructure and allow smooth storage expansion plus an upgrade
path to 8Gb FC for investment protection. Short’s team worked with
long-standing storage and virtualisation partner NCE, which proposed the Dot Hill AssuredSAN
series as the ideal solution.

The first pair of Dot Hill AssuredSAN 5730 arrays were
installed housing 12 600GB SAS drives.

“Our 5730 arrays support the
capacity needs of Grundon’s business-critical applications and the demands of
the DMS system too,” said Warren Reid, Director of Marketing EMEA at Dot
Hill. “The majority of the data stored on the systems is made up of SQL
server databases, and following the decision to minimise paper documents,
Grundon’s storage requirements have gone through the roof and continue to grow
rapidly; Dot Hill’s technology offers the right combination of capacity,
performance and cost.“

Grundon incorporated the Dot Hill arrays within a
virtualised storage environment in order to provide a replication solution for
its business applications. Data is replicated across seven of the main
operating sites, with a storage array installed at each location.

Short explains an important feature of the AssuredSAN:
“The same web-based interface and physical footprint are found across the
entire Dot Hill product range and this gives it a significant advantage for us
when compared to many of the competitive solutions we considered. This
continuity will enable us to add storage, software features or performance
while protecting our original investment in the Dot Hill 5730 systems.“

All of the Dot Hill AssuredSAN external storage arrays are
based on the same modular design, which means that upgrades within the
range are straightforward and quick. This approach avoids the complete
fork-lift style upgrade that is needed with many alternative solutions when
moving up the range for more performance or to embrace new interface protocol
speeds.

Short added: “The Dot Hill platform has met and even
exceeded our performance needs at a price point that was well within our
budget. We will certainly be considering the Dot Hill AssuredSAN systems as we
grow our infrastructure and replace legacy systems.“