UK Park Resorts Upgrades Data Center

DataCore Software Corporation announced
that Park Resorts Ltd, UK providers of family holidays with
over 39 coastal parks, are using DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor
solution running alongside Dot Hill Systems Corp.‘s Assured SAN Arrays to lead the great
escape away from slow I/O speeds and unpredictable application responses.

Ajay
Patil is the infrastructure manager responsible for the storage and
virtualisation infrastructure throughout the group from the Hertfordshire head
office. With vacation spend in a recessionary decline overall, UK based
‘Staycations’ have become a popular alternative to travel abroad in recent
years and Park Resorts have enjoyed a 6% increase in annual growth
year-on-year. However, as with the entire industry, costs need to be
realistically contained to facilitate growth, maintain competitive edge and
ensure future scalability.

As it was, nine months ago, Ajay noted issues in the existing storage
infrastructure with hardware falling out of warranty and a notable decrease in
the performance of applications running on VMs. For the user, this
would manifest in poor performance of applications and I/O bottlenecks leading
to unpredictability when querying the company database and a reduction of
productivity at peak times.

Ajay commented: "Whilst a brief
delay in inputting a holiday booking or ordering an extra activity onsite may
not seem critical, vacation time is so precious and the environment so
competitive, that we want to keep the whole Park Resort experience hugely
positive, from the moment a holiday is considered to returning the keys on
departure."

Keen to facilitate a solid and reliable solution that would be future-proofed
for years to come, Ajay called upon storage and virtualisation
partner, NCE, to provide independent advice and latest recommendations.

NCE Solution Re-engineers
Park
Resorts Storage Infrastructure
With Performance, Agility and Scalability:
Having
virtualised their server room with VMware some years prior, Park
Resorts remain aware of the compelling benefits of virtualisation to achieve
higher service levels through reduced server overhead. NCE undertook a mapping of the existing environment in order to identify the performance gaps.

Ajay explains: "Our key requirement
was to ensure that we put in place a foundation that would not only deliver on
our immediate requirements for increased performance and capacity, but would
allow us to scale as the business applications, user demands and data sets all
continue to grow in the future." 

Resilience,
performance enhancement, BC were critical success factors, with NCE suggesting
additional offsite DR reutilizing legacy storage. They also recommended
installation of the latest version of the DataCore’s storage hypervisor with
small factor, but performance, Dot Hill arrays.

As Ajay notes, affordability remained a critical acceptance item: "We had to maintain a balance between the
features that we needed and the features that although were interesting and
attractive, would simply never be used. Reassuringly, the approved solution
retained a realistic TCO price point."

Implementation:
Now
there are two SANsymphony-V virtualisation nodes providing synchronous
mirroring for true resilience running at the Hemel Hempstead site. The two nodes are based on Dell R720 Servers
running Windows Server software. These nodes, combined with a pair of Dot Hill
Assured SAN 3000 Arrays for
disk-to-disk data protection, form the backbone of the storage solution. The
Assured SAN 3000 rack mounted Arrays each offer Park Resorts
approximately 4TB of usable storage through provision of 2.5" 15k rpm HDS, attached directly over FC to the QLogic HBAs in each of the nodes.  Both the storage hypervisor and the arrays arrived ready, and technically certified,
with vSphere v5.0. 

Full
DR and remote site failover is provided, using offsite replication over IP to a
third SANsymphony-V Storage Virtualisation node housed some 30 miles away
offering asynchronous mirroring. DR was made affordable using one of the
reutilized legacy storage arrays, with the storage hypervisor running on a Dell
R710 Server running Windows Server software. 

Consolidation and reduction of
resources:
Even
though Park Resorts had used virtualisation for many years, the knock-on effect
of consolidation of footprint, resources, and carbon efficiencies still
resonates with the small form factor offered in the solution.

Ajay comments: "Onsite, it’s about
maximizing every cm of floor space and with the scalable 2U 24bay rack and the
transparent software hypervisor layer reducing the need for additional storage
hardware, we once again see that our footprint has been dramatically reduced.
That’s a great feeling and a significant reduction in resources and ongoing
management." 

And looking further afield, Ajay reflects: "With the new infrastructure, we have successfully taken Park Resorts
into the next generation of virtualisation efficiency, overcoming the user
issues of slower performance of our SQL database and eradicating I/O
bottlenecks in the process. We know that we have a scalable solution that meets
all of our objectives both now, and in the future."