SARCOM simplifies storage Virtualization makes provisioning and management much easier ? and more cost effective
"HP proposed a much cleaner, less complex way of handling storage
allocation with one virtual LUN. The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual
Array is a lot simpler and 50 percent faster."
? Todd Crites, Chief Information Officer, SARCOM, Inc.
HP customer case
study: Virtual SAN Objective:
Improve storage performance, flexibility, and infrastructure built on reliability while reducing costs and protecting HP StorageWorks data Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), HP Approach: BladeSystem, and HP Replace EMC CLARiiON storage array with a Data Protector virtualized HP-based SAN infrastructure linked to Software server blades, with point-in-time replication (full data set snapclones) and backup to tape libraries Industry: Information Technology and IT improvements: Services . 50 percent faster storage allocation . Better storage resource utilization . Instantaneous replication of full data sets . Integrated, unified management of storage and The heart of its business servers Capturing, storing, and analyzing ever-greater . Greater capacity amounts of information are all at the core of . Simpler provisioning of services SARCOM's business. Therefore, the company needed to transform its IT infrastructure and establish responsive, manageable, and easy-to-provision data Business benefits: storage. The firm was unable to effectively manage . Better control and lower costs data with the EMC CLARiiON 600 array as their . Faster access to business intelligence for business grew. In addition to drive failures, the array improved customer solutions could no longer meet SARCOM's requirements for . Reduced risk of data loss and improved business capacity, backups, point-in-time copies, or database continuity management.
. Greater flexibility and agility to respond to Most critically, says Todd Crites, SARCOM CIO, "The change CLARiiON was never able to fully replicate our data and make infallible copies. We didn't even look at replacing it with another EMC system." had to build multiple RAID groups or mirrors and then "Having HP storage, servers, and software present the middle LUNs to the hosts. The HP EVA saves time in reconfiguring storage. That's important together makes it easy to provision new because we're always creating storage LUNs for testing or other reasons." services and offer customers a specific Combined with virtualization features is the array's solution. As a result, we have become a ability to take point-in-time copies or snapclones of an entire data set for backup ? a process SARCOM more agile company." couldn't fully achieve until now. Recalls Crites, "When we tried to take point-in-time copies on our other array, ? Todd Crites, Chief Information Officer, the images would fade through, and we couldn't be SARCOM, Inc. sure of making a recoverable image." Equally important, with the HP solution SARCOM does not have to pay "service fees" to make changes or add drives to its new array. Quick deployment HP Services installed the new SAN quickly. "The HP engineers came out for about a day, set up the arrays, The advantages of virtualization and then we attached servers to them," says Crites. Searching for a better solution, SARCOM management SARCOM uses a 14 TB EVA for its primary production took a long, hard look at the HP StorageWorks environment and a smaller 4 TB EVA for disaster Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA). They visited the HP recovery and backup - in conjunction with HP Data Storage Solution Center in Colorado Springs, Protector Software, which backs up data to two HP Colorado several times to listen to briefings and see StorageWorks 4400 Tape Libraries. These HP business the arrays in action. continuity, availability, and disaster recovery solutions "Our experience with the Storage Solution Center was are designed to promote resilient operations - and very positive," says SARCOM's Senior VP of Product help SARCOM recover its critical data in the event of Solutions Dan Schneider. "You learn about more than an unexpected outage. the HP storage portfolio; you learn how HP For example, Data Protector fosters continuity of approaches the whole enterprise-computing internal business operations with automated data framework." backup and recovery, as well as scalability to support SARCOM managers were especially... [download for more]
