Irish League of Credit Unions Adopts DataCore SANsymphony-V

DataCore Software
Corporation announced that the Irish
League of Credit Unions (ILCU) has adopted DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage
hypervisor solution.

The ILCU represents 484 financial institutions across Ireland, with combined
assets of €13.6 billion and membership of over 3 million in credit unions.
Whilst independent, credit unions remain in the ownership of their members and
are facilitated by common bonds to ensure that the savings of members are available
to fellow members as loans. The ILCU was set up as an umbrella organisation to
represent and provide joint services to the affiliated credit unions. Acting as
a single consolidated body on a national level, the ILCU represents and
provides expansive services including legal counsel, HR advice, joint
advertising, professional services and ICT.

ILCU achieves custom-made virtual environment
for
both servers and storage:
Faced with ageing physical hardware which was becoming
increasingly complicated, volatile and challenging to manage, ILCU decided it
was an opportunity to take a fresh look at the entire environment through
server and storage virtualisation to reap the benefits of consolidation,
decrease overheads and achieve a greater availability of critical business
applications.

Malcolm Moir, infrastructure services manager at ILCU’s Dublin HQ, said: "Our very ethos is about providing equitable,
reliable, shared & stable assets to our user base.  We knew that there
had to be a better way to service them with a highly available environment that
also offered DR."

They turned to architecture advisor and Irish DataCore
Gold partner, Typetec Ltd, who recommended
and implemented vSphere for server virtualisation to optimise the utilisation
of common resources (CPUs and disks) and to readily redeploy these resources
(servers and storage) when and where needed. Typetec also explained that
vSphere requires additional assistance to enable advanced functions such as
workload migration, load balancing, fail-over and DR, and is completely
dependent on HA shared storage platform. They went on to introduce the concept
of a storage hypervisor to ILCU – a portable, centrally-managed software
package from DataCore that extends provisioning, replication and performance
and acceleration services.

To prove the concept of what could be achieved moving
away from traditional DAS on a SAN, Typetec took the unusual step of creating
ILCU’s entire infrastructure within their own internal test and development
lab. A pair of SANsymphony-V nodes was tested in a dual mirrored
configuration, running on standard x86 Intel hardware. ILCU were invited for an
interactive hands-on briefing session using the intuitive interface of
SANsymphony-V to achieve automatic failover of both path and data through the
DataCore Storage Hypervisor.  With concepts proven and validating customer
research into some of the 8,000 DataCore global customers gained, installation
commenced.

Installation
Commences:
Installation commenced, first consolidating the
workload of ILCU’s twenty physical servers into two HP ProLiant servers which run as
VM hosts for VMware. Two further ProLiant servers act as the host for
the SANsymphony-V nodes acting in a synchronous mirrored pair to
alleviate the fear of a single point of failure. Closing this single potential
failure scenario in the DR process for the ILCU was a step in
achieving a heightened sense of security.

Malcolm elaborates: "Previously,
conversations with our business colleagues would centre on how DR should work.
With the new DataCore SANsymphony-V environment, those service level
conversations shifted into providing advice on how individual BC background
processes could be optimised for each department. That’s significant when you
consider that assured BC has been achieved at 60% of the cost of alternative
storage environments."

But it is not just DR and HA that has been
gained. Because of the way SANsymphony-V SAN-wide caching
engine works, there is an active decrease in IO bottlenecks associated with
server virtualisation that overcomes performance issues for critical shared
applications such as Exchange and SQL for employees.

Back in the Dublin server room, further benefits have
emerged. When it comes to ILCU requiring additional disk, no longer does
Malcolm have to speculate up front how much disk may be required. SANsymphony-V constantly monitors the size of the available disk pool
and with 25% left to go, sends alerts to the team. Indeed, adding new VM’s and
maintaining the virtual estate, is no longer a complex provisioning exercise
that involves downtime. Instead it’s a point-and-click exercise where storage
is allocated to each VM through DataCore’s SANsymphony-V. SLAs have also improved with Malcolm confident
and comfortable that further reductions can still be achieved by simply
adding a third SANsymphony-V asynchronous node to the offsite DR site
a few miles away. The foundations have been set and with further optimisation
assured.

"We started
this project with the main aim of decreasing costs, modernising our environment
and achieving reliable DR. Undoubtedly, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V is the
cornerstone to this achievement. We are proud of the service we can now offer
the business." He summarises.

As SANsymphony-V solution has been running
for 12 months, we will leave the final comments on reliability to Malcolm:
"The stability of the storage hypervisor
has impressed me. It’s simply an install and forget product that we rarely need
to change. And at ILCU, it’s proven. We did have a failover, but it was totally
oblivious to the business, with no interruption of services and a simple
notification by email, storage is failed over automatically. That’s massively
reassuring."