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Customer Stories |
Recent Projects: 4th Quarter 2007
Customer Stories - Extracts, Recent Projects
Major Business Services Group
A leading marketing strategy and data solutions consultancy was taken over by a large corporate business services company which resulted in the consolidation of two data centres and Tectrade was engaged to manage the migration of data.
Both businesses maintained secure data centres hosting data for other household name companies.
The challenge was the criticality, sensitivity and availability of that data. Stringent downtime penalties meant that in some cases as little as six hours downtime window was provided to move terabytes of data and multiple servers three hours up the motorway and provision service back to the users. All the data was housed on a centralised disk sub-system (HDS) and was being migrated to an IBM DS8000 at the destination site.
The downtime windows and sensitivity of the data prevented a simple power-down on all equipment and move approach, as it would have taken days not hours. That approach also prevented a suitable back-out plan if there was a disaster (lorry crash, or hardware failure). The cost of copying the data between sites was prohibitive due to size of link required and the distance between sites.
As one large single move was not possible, several moves were conducted instead. Tectrade devised a strategy of using IBM's SAN Volume Controller technology and any-to-any mirroring across disk sub-systems and physically moving smaller, more mobile sub-systems.
This approach left the original data secure at the source location, for ease of roll back and allowed the migration from HDS USP600 to an IBM DS8000, with minimum downtime to their customers, and between data centres 120 miles apart.
In total, two data centres were migrated over eleven separate move groups. Fifty seven servers were moved and 70TB of data. Each move was valued at approximately £2million pounds of data.
The data migration aspect of the project was managed by Tectrade and completed before the deadline for evacuating the redundant data centre, which would have incurred a multi-million pound expense if missed.
Public Sector - County Council
This large authority wanted to simplify their existing storage environment as part of a new enterprise archiving project and general technology refresh. The refresh included the migration of Lotus Notes and SQL databases and file data from an old SAN with the minimum of downtime.
The authority went to competitive tender and Tectrade was successful with an innovative solution incorporating IBM storage virtualisation (SVC) and a mixture of FCAL and SATA storage tiers. Of particular interest to the authority, was the large number of sites already using IBMís storage virtualisation technology and its ability to migrate data from the old SAN to the new, without downtime.
International Media Company
Tectrade has been working with this group for two years to help create a more flexible and cost effective storage environment. This latest project has been focused on expanding their second and third tier disk and expanding storage virtualisation to embrace all their disk resource. As part of a process of constant improvement, additional performance and capacity was provided by moving all existing tape drives onto LTO4 technology.