NetApp FAS 2040 at Zoological Society of London

NetApp provides the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), a registered charity, a
learned society and a visitor attraction,
with an IT solution and a disaster recovery plan.

The Challenge:
Find a way to replace an ageing server and storage
infrastructure, create space, relieve a maxed out power and air con
infrastructure and implement a disaster recovery solution by upgrading and
virtualising the existing servers and storage. 

The Solution:
Working with virtualisation specialist, S3 Consulting, ZSL virtualised its server environment and upgraded
the existing storage as well as implementing a disaster recovery platform
to maintain business continuity.

Benefits:

• A flexible
  solution with 100% redundancy
• Now
  compliant with disaster recovery audit recommendations
• Server
  virtualisation avoided building a new server room, saving £200,000
• Two
  temporary air conditioning units have been turned off saving £20,000 on power
• Reduced
  energy consumption by 24.5kw and carbon emissions by 143 tons

Solution components:

• FAS 2040 12 x 450Gb SAS. 24 x 1Tb SATA.
• Windows Bundle
• NetApp Deduplication
• NetApp FlexVol
• NetApp Operations Manager
• NetApp RAID-DP
• NetApp Snapshot
• NetApp System Manager
• Protocols FC

Environment:

• VMware vSphere Enterprise
• VMware Site Recovery manager
• FAS 2020A 26 x 1Tb SATA
• Complete bundle
• NetApp Deduplication
• NetApp FlexVol
• NetApp Operations Manager
• NetApp RAID-DP
• NetApp Snapshot
• NetApp System Manager

Protocols:

• iSCSI
• Environment: VMware vSphere Enterprise

Customer Profile:
ZSL is a charity devoted
to the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats.
Between its two sites ZSL London Zoo and ZSL Whipsnade Zoo, it attracts 1.5
million visitors per year and has a £42 million turnover.

ZSL has 2 sites, houses 500 members of staff 30 office
buildings, 100 scientists, and runs conservation programmes in 40 countries
around the world.

The Challenge: Find a flexible, easy to manage solution
that meets disaster
recovery regulations
ZSL London Zoo in Regent’s
Park and ZSL Whipsnade
Zoo in Bedfordshire are major tourist attractions, and it is therefore crucial
that ticketing, retail, catering and reservations run efficiently to enable
customers to have the best possible experience. System downtime on busy days
could affect business operations and potentially bring both of
ZSL’s sites to a halt with unwanted impact on customers.

After a disaster recovery audit revealed that ZSL was
exposed when it came to recovering the business, Nick Napier, Head of
ICT at ZSL, knew he needed to upgrade his existing IT estate to accommodate a
faster disaster recovery solution.

Physical space was at a premium for Napier with all 37
servers located at the London
site. "We knew our disaster recovery wasn’t as robust as we needed it to be", says Napier, "we also knew it wouldn’t be feasible to implement a disaster
recovery solution at either site without consolidating the existing servers
first."

With a small in-house IT team, ZSL needed a simple solution
that would not impact business operations. Napier approached virtualisation
specialist, S3 Consulting with the vision of investing in an IT project,
focusing on virtualisation and disaster recovery to protect the business.

The Solution: Making IT Work
The initial phase of virtualisation took place in May 2010,
which involved consolidating the original server estate into three virtualised
blade servers through VMware, which run alongside the NetApp storage.

Napier explains that S3 Consulting recommended NetApp
immediately: "NetApp offered the most flexible hardware so we agreed readily
and opted for two FAS products with that would work in conjunction with
VMware’s Site Recovery Manager."

It was at this stage that achieving ZSL’s business
continuity objective became clear. "Up until this point we didn’t have a full
disaster recovery plan," says Napier. "So we spoke to S3 Consulting about
whether we could use NetApp equipment to replicate every day to another site
and it really gave us the light at the end of the tunnel we’d been looking
for."

One of the NetApp FAS 2000 series systems was installed at
the London site and the other at Whipsnade, using existing bandwidth between
the two to copy virtual servers from site to site, to mirror and synchronise
data. The multi-site configuration enabled a solution with 100%
redundancy for ZSL

This S3 Consulting designed solution was particularly
important to Napier in commissioning the project "IT is not our business so I
really wanted something that supported our needs but worked out of the box
after being professionally configured," says Napier. "Unlike larger companies
we don’t have hundreds of people to look after the technology; it really needs
just to work."

In addition, S3 Consulting also installed NetApp Snapshots
to enable daily server snapshots which are then replicated to the mirror site.
Napier comments, "Using snapshots and synchronising our data across both sites
has taken the onus off backup for recovery, which has greatly improved our
ability to restore to a point in time almost instantaneously."

Business Benefits:
A flexible solution with 100% redundancy
Following the server virtualisation and disaster recovery
implementation, ZSL has witnessed multiple business benefits and continues to
see efficiency rising as costs plummet. The whole project took just 6 weeks to
complete. "S3 Consulting knew exactly what we wanted and implemented it, working
closely with my small team with no affect to the business," says Napier.

"NetApp has allowed
us to use our existing bandwidth for dual site replication. NetApp’s site
recovery means that if the servers in Regents
Park go down, we can immediately get
the data from Whipsnade and can go back online in London with minimal impact on the business.
This is fantastic for ZSL," explains Napier.

This new solution has taken the
pressure off backup. NetApp has provided ZSL with a number of different ways of
restoring data; RAID 10 can cope with up to two simultaneous disk failures
making back up less vital.

ZSL is now able to demonstrate to its Directors and auditors
that it has a full plan in place and can be up and running within hours of the
servers going down. This adds a huge benefit to visitors as it enhances the
customer experience. The availability of services within the Zoo is extremely
important, ZSL want its visitors to be able to use the restaurants and gift
shops at their convenience and this is now possible.

The disaster recovery plan led to the
next step, a full-blown business continuity policy, explains Napier. "If
there’s a problem at Regent’s
Park, we can now switch
the business over to Whipsnade. This is now eminently achievable which it
simply wasn’t before," he says. "Not only did S3 Consulting help us implement
the initial disaster recovery platform, they have also helped us put in place a
structured failover testing plan to ensure that we were comfortable
operationally with the solution and procedures to manage it. We recently
successfully ran the plan to really show that it would work."

On top of this, proposals to build a new server room became
unnecessary immediately, saving ZSL £200,000. Two temporary air conditioning
units have also been turned off, resulting in £20,000 of  power
savings.

"IT is not our business so I really wanted something that
supported our needs but worked out of the box after being professionally
configured," says Napier. "Unlike larger companies we don’t have hundreds of
people to look after the technology; it really needs just to work," said
Napier.