Musical instrument maker amplifies productivity on virtualisation solutions

Faced with a growing illustrated catalogue of instruments, Mario Rockoff, system administrator at Warwick, says storage capacity was being pushed to the limit. However, instead of upgrading capacity and buying more systems, he went for SANmelody to virtualise and optimise usage of the existing estate. “We took the storage capacity bottleneck and a move to a new building as the opportunity to completely address and reorganise our server and storage environment,” he explains. “We wanted to build up a second data centre that not only guaranteed high availability, but allowed us to handle our resources more efficiently.” The virtualisation project itself was handed by IT service provider Godyo, which implemented two HP Opteron Quadcore machines for a VMware ESX Server in the main and emergency data centre, running five virtual servers on a Unix cluster – covering the database, ERP system and several Windows applications. An MSA 1500 system was added, implemented remotely in the new data centre and connected redundantly with synchronous data monitoring over a Fibre Channel network. Both storage subsystems were upgraded with extra SCSI disks making more than 11TB of capacity available. “By allocating the resources separately in two isolated areas and implementing DataCore’s auto failover and failback synchronous mirroring, we have achieved high availability for our business applications,” says Rockoff. “Since the implementation of VMware and DataCore’s SANmelody, our systems run failsafe, are cheaper to administer, are hardware-independent and give us new levels of flexibility to easily expand. Without SANmelody, our ability to virtualise our systems would not be complete. Storage virtualisation has allowed us to gain productivity by automating many time-intensive storage processes and tasks.”