UK Agri-Food Supply Chain Research and Analysis Organisation Fera Using DataCore

DataCore Software Corporation, announced that Fera Science Limited (Fera), has been using DataCore’s SANsymphony-V solution for five years to optimise their once struggling applications held on VMs to allow fast data mining of PBs of research data gleaned from ongoing trials.

As a centre of excellence for interdisciplinary investigation and problem solving across plant and bee health, crop protection, sustainable agriculture, food and feed quality and chemical safety in the environment, Fera is renowned nationally and internally. Fera users are both internal employees; predominantly scientists accessing information and readings in order to make recommendations for optimal yields, alongside external customers; with Fera providing services to 7,500 commercial Agri Food customers alongside UK governmental organisations including Department of Environment, Farming & Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Ben Jones, Fera data centre manager, said: “Today Fera provides a large, single campus modern metro cluster split across 2 sites for assured HA and we enjoy fast performance even in peak transaction times. Roll-back five years and the situation was less clear with a large, fragmented estate that contained a mix of legacy devices, brands and technology. We needed an overlay layer that would unify and manage our assets maximizing the investment that we had already made. We ultimately found this using software defined storage provided though DataCore’s SANsymphony-V platform. “

Dealing with a quadrupling data set every 4 years
Going back in time five years, Fera’s then beleaguered IT Team took the decision to go back to the drawing board to address the multiple problem areas whilst future-proofing the size of the data set. Containing Fera’s diverse and sprawling IT server and storage estate was the first pressing issue for the team, with multiple Dell/HP/NetApp/IBM standalone servers and hundreds of legacy direct attached and NAS devices across the mirrored data centre. Each year, IT had the onerous task of accurately anticipating the up-front storage requirements of departmental storage – or risk running out of space if storage had been inadvertently designated to another path. Performing maintenance, upgrades and critical updates across so many brands was also a huge overhead. Each time maintenance was performed, the mirrored device also had to be disabled, taken offline and then resumed. IT also wished to curtail the ongoing spiraling cost of network connections, multiples of which had been added in an effort to assist BC.

For the Fera user internally, the flailing IT infrastructure manifested in ongoing issues with speed of access to their applications, together with the inability to mine reports and record and access information as the maintenance window grew. At different times across the seasons, productivity levels dwindled further still as vast swathes of data arrived in unpredictable batches. The clustered NetApp setup was becoming restrictive, meaning that the VMware hosted application performance was becoming an ongoing bottleneck as applications competed for I/O. The IT team selected DataCore’s software to run on a pair of Dell  2U PowerEdge 2950s and thereby centralising the VMware critical hosts to improve performance and allow live migration of VMs without downtime. Time progressed and five years on and with upgrades to SANsymphony-V for enterprise virtualisation, all data is accessed through SANsymphony-V and it is the established software defined backbone to Fera’s ongoing IT infrastructure.

Fera provides its members with a large, modern metro cluster split across two same-campus sites for HA. Through DataCore, Fera offers twelve vSphere 5.1 ESX hosts running 300 VMs offering essential business applications. Additionally, SANsymphony-V manages and protects 250 physical servers with all legacy NetApp storage served and front-ended by SANsymphony-V.

All of Fera’s storage pools and virtual disks are mirrored giving ongoing availability. Downtime is firmly an issue of the past as through SANsymphony-V, one side of the mirror stays functioning and available, while IT perform patches, Windows updates, backend fixes and essential critical updates to the other side.

Ben continues: “Essentially DataCore gives us the freedom of procurement across the estate. That’s a powerful statement.  We can now research and select which disk chassis and vendors are most suited to Fera and select those which we know will have the best controllers and offer the highest density. Using DataCore as the software layer, we have found ourselves being able to confidently migrate away from incumbent brands as management is now unified and assured. With it, we have reduced the ongoing maintenance overhead.“

DataCore’s Auto-Tiering feature assists Fera to allocate over 1PB of data. Auto-Tiering is used within the environment with a quadruple tiering policy allocating and automating data into the most appropriate class of storage. For Fera this entails critical user data being allocated to tier 1 (SSDs); – Vmware specific and scientific data to tier 2 (FC SAS);- general data apportioned to tier 3 (nearline SATA disks); and lastly, archiving data (including the vast quantities of raw science data sets) which are allocated to tier 4 (held on repurposed SATA drives). This final re-purposed tier allows Fera without any additional overhead, to be able to retrieve if required for compliance, data sets from over 5 years ago.

HA is assured within Fera. This became increasingly important nine months ago when Fera formed a joint commercial partnership with DEFRA to provide 24×7 access to focused research across both organisations.

Ben concludes: “We are so confident in DataCore that we have based our entire environment upon it. Using DataCore, Fera now has a single management interface across our hundreds of disparate devices. It has become the cornerstone to our data centre.“

Case study