DataCore SANsymphony-V for Quorn Foods

DataCore Software Corporation announced that Quorn Foods (Marlow Foods Ltd) have adopted
their SANsymphony-V software to achieve HA; turbo charged application
performance and have engaged intelligent ILM
data flow with structured auto tiering.

Marlow Foods, better known as the owner of the Quorn brand, offers low
fat, meat free food products to the discerning, health conscious customer. Employing 
600 across three UK sites, Quorn’s head of IT is Fred Holmes. Back in 2011 when sold from a large parent
company, Quorn had the opportunity to remap the entire existing physical server
infrastructure which was rapidly falling
outside of warranty.

Fred notes: "This was a three phrase
project and had to be classified as a major systems overhaul that we were
embarking on. In phase 1, DataCore’s SANsymphony-V enabled smooth migration
within a two-week period and dramatically increased IOPS, even with the high
burden that virtual servers place when they are delivering thin client
capabilities".

Phase I: Server side virtualisation progresses
into Greenfield Site with DataCore providing
centralised storage
and 99.999% reliability
They consulted their trusted IT partner and DataCore gold partner, Waterstons Ltd, to assist with the major
infrastructure overhaul. A greenfield site for virtualisation, Fred and the
assigned Waterstons project team, provided compelling financial analysis showing
consolidation and resource savings to boot. A working proof of concept was
deployed to substantiate findings and test that a Microsoft Remote Desktop
Services (RDS) farm could support all applications for test user group, and to
prove the benefits of server virtualization.

Two months later, the project team implemented server
side virtualisation with three additional R710 hosts, all Brocade FC attached
to a SAN to support the VMware vSphere Enterprise feature set. In
total 30 workloads were virtualised into the new environment to allow older
physical servers to be retired. From the desktop perspective, a new RDS farm
replaced 400 traditional desktops with thin client capabilities.

SANsymphony-V solution provided the essential cost-effective
centralised storage running across two Dell T710 commodity servers. DataCore’s
storage hypervisor provided one general purpose synchronously mirrored SAN pool
of 7TB usable (across a total of 48 10k SAS spindles in MD1220 SAS-attached
storage shelves) to provide 99.999% reliability.

The project team knew that the success of any robust, responsive VMware
environment hinges on the abilities and performance of the storage
infrastructure that sits beneath. This was especially true in Quorn’s
virtualised infrastructure with users interacting directly with virtual RDS
Session Hosts. From a business user perception, the virtualised estate provided
them with a turbocharged world.

Phase II: taking ERP

into virtual world and using DataCore
to reduce data mining times from 20mn to 20s
Phase II covered virtualisation of SAP ERP for
financial, HR, accounts and sales platforms. With around 8,500 outlets that
stock the Quorn brand across the UK alone, Marlow Foods have
a high dependency on their ERP servers to drive critical business
advantages across all departments. The challenge was to integrate the current
SAP physical servers into the virtualised environment, whilst maintaining their
99.999% reliability and not affecting existing virtual machines reliant on the
SAN. To address this challenge, the project team added another R710 host to the
cluster, and a further 4TB of usable synchronously mirrored storage within a
new storage pool dedicated entirely to SAP (across a further 48 10k SAS
spindles) and began the process to rebuild their SAP servers into the virtual
infrastructure. This meant transitioning huge databases from the old physical
environment. Proof would come at the end of the month, when database queries
were traditionally the highest and performance expectations were unmet with
erratic response times.

In fact, the data mining queries were returned within 20 seconds, compared to
20 minutes in the previous physical environment. This is in no small part down
to the way that SANsymphony-V leverages disk resources, assigning
I/O tasks to very fast server RAM and CPU to accelerate throughput and to speed
up response when reading and writing to disk. And with the
mirrored configuration, continuous availability is afforded.

"Like all things in IT, dramatic
improvements to the infrastructure remain invisible to the user who only
notices when things go wrong. But in this instance, no one could fail to notice
the dramatic leaps in performance that was now afforded," Fred notes.

Phase III: Enhancing virtualised estate
with auto-tiering
With everything virtualised, Fred and the team gave themselves six months to
reflect and monitor the new infrastructure before suggesting additional
enhancements. What Fred suspected was that he could also achieve greater
intelligence from the SAN itself.

Simon Birbeck, Waterstons, one of the UK’s only DataCore master certified installation
engineers, designed a performance
enhancing model to migrate data blocks to the most
appropriate class of storage within the estate. Thinly provisioned SAN capacity
was at around 80% utilization, but for 2013 planning Fred and the Waterstons
team had allocated a 20% year-on-year growth, thereby potentially stretching
utilisation to the maximum by the end of the year. Simon recommended switching
to a three tier SAN design to facilitate the best cascading practices of ILM.

A red top tier comprised a new layer of SSD flash storage, designed to be
always full and utilized by the most frequently read blocks for
fast response. A pre-existing amber mid-tier caters for the average use data
blocks served by commodity 10k SAS drives. 
Sitting beneath is a blue tier as the catch all’ layer for the least
frequently accessed data, maintained on low cost, high capacity 7.2k SAS
spindles.

Fred summarises: "What Waterstons
recommended was an intelligent usable form of ILM with DataCore’s SANsymphony-V
at the front-end making the intelligent decision as to which blocks should be
allocated where."

Indeed SANsymphony-V has provided both strong reporting and accurate planning
for data growth. Built-in diagnostics help to pro-actively identify when a
problem is manifesting, changing the management role from reactive to
proactive/intelligent.

For the future, Marlow Foods will look to expand on the HA/BC environment
afforded by SANsymphony-V by adding a further asynchronous replica at another
site to further protect the SAP ERP environment. The scalability of
SANsymphony-V brings a new level of comfort.

Fred takes the final words: "DataCore’s
SANsymphony-V now reliably underpins the entire estate. From a transformation
perspective we have new levels of availability and enhanced decision making for
both IT and the users."