Thin provisioning and virtualisation solve Alcan-Singen’s capacity problems

Its system combines DataCore SAN [storage area network] virtualisation and VMware. That has enabled it to consolidate two local storage networks into one company-wide SAN, providing centralised storage management and ‘thin provisioning’ using DataCore’s hardware-independent SANsymphony central management platform. Thin provisioning – automating capacity management to applications – is the key to its higher utilisation of data storage resources and improved load balancing across the SAN, which automatically corrects network bottlenecks. Alcan’s investment follows a period of significant growth and acquisition, resulting in more applications added to its network. That led to pressure on local performance and capacity bottlenecks in the two separate data centres. “Alcan had already experienced the benefits of virtualisation, due its VMware installation, so it was a natural progression to add storage virtualisation that allowed similar hardware independence for their data,” says Benjamin Nies, key account manager at system integrator Kumatronik. “Storage and server virtualisation go hand-in-hand and it makes sense to combine the advantages offered by both technologies,” he adds. Alcan installed SANsymphony on two standard servers in separate data centres. These have become the Storage Domain Servers (SDS), which centrally control and redundantly protect the total data storage complex via six Fibre Channel switches. Through these storage servers, Alcan now has advanced enterprise features and services such as synchronous mirroring, snapshots, thin provisioning and auto failover. These features and services are virtualised across the network. Existing storage devices were re-used, and with better resource utilisation, Alcan has been able to sort out its capacity shortage without additional buying new hardware. The application server can now access the total disk capacity in the larger, virtual storage pools without restrictions and, says Alcan, has significantly higher performance, thanks to SANsymphony’s cache performance technologies. “We are more than satisfied with the end result. We have created a complete virtual system environment within a very short period of time at minimum cost and operating expense, which offers us high availability and flexibility and lowers our administrative work,” says Dieter Büche, Alcan’s system administrator. “With a comparatively low investment, we benefit from enterprise features that not only integrate and optimise existing resources, but free us from vendor lock-in, saving expenses today and into the future.”