Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches Featuring DataCore Software, Vcentral and FUJIFILM UK

By Stephanie Jordan
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FUJIFILM London is the UK subsidiary of Fuji Photo Film Co Ltd of Japan. After considering the results of a full cost of ownership report provided by Vcentral, a DataCore Software partner, which predicted that FUJIFILM UK could have an effective, robust, virtualized environment using only two-thirds of the hardware, while also providing a watertight disaster recovery (DR) solution, FUJIFILM UK deployed three DataCore SANmelody 2.0 Fibre Channel SANs running on HP ML370 G5 machines with 12 x 146Gb SAS disks on each machine. Two SANmelody servers act as identical mirrors in active mode, while one is located in a separate DR site five miles from the main data center and is connected using a 10Mb LAN extension link. In this configuration, SANmelody supports the four VMware servers and twelve virtual servers and applications running on the network and provides a full DR solution.

“Consolidation was becoming increasingly necessary to stem the pressure on the team having to backup, manage and ultimately move redundant servers,” states Manish Amriwala, network and desktop support team manager, FUJIFILM UK. “We needed a dedicated SAN and virtualized servers that would accommodate our growth and transition us from the restrictions of disk space provided by direct-attached storage. Now maintenance and allocating storage is much easier. Using SANmelody in a mirrored configuration, patches and new applications and servers can be easily uploaded; as one SANmelody box can be taken down without any interruption to business applications as the other SANmelody takes over.”

Published July 22, 2009