The Solution
Significant Cost Savings
“We asked Celerity, an IBM Premier Business Partner, to perform a full audit of our existing storage landscape and come up with a better, more cost-effective solution,” explains Woodworth. “They proposed the IBM Virtualised Disk Solution, which combines IBM hardware and software to deliver a more compact, scalable and easy-to-manage storage architecture at a lower cost than our existing platform.”
The IBM Virtualised Disk Solution implemented at Denbighshire comprises an IBM System Storage DS5020 Express with three disk drawers that contain a mixture of high-speed Fibre Channel and high- capacity SATA disks. IBM SAN Volume Controller is used to virtualise this disk system and simplify management.
“Our analysis showed that over the next three years, the maintenance for our existing system would cost very nearly as much as the entire purchase price of the IBM Virtualised Disk Solution, which comes with three years’ maintenance included,” says Woodworth. “When we factored in the reductions in power and air-conditioning costs for the new system, and the extra functionality that SAN Volume Controller would provide, it became obvious that the IBM Virtualised Disk Solution offered much better value.”
Powerful storage management with SAN Volume Controller
“During the migration we used SAN Volume Controller’s thin provisioning feature to reallocate disk space more efficiently to our existing systems. As a result, we recovered 3.5 TB of storage that had previously been wasted. In the future, thin provisioning will enable us to allocate storage volumes in a more flexible way, so we will only need to purchase additional disks when our systems actually require it.”
IBM SAN Volume Controller also makes the storage landscape much easier to manage, providing a simple web console that allows the underlying infrastructure to be treated as a single ‘pool’ of virtualised storage. When the IT team wants to provision a storage volume for a new server, there is no need to worry about physical disks or RAID configuration, as all the complexity is handled automatically. Moreover, if the Council wants to add another disk system to its network, SAN Volume Controller can seamlessly add it to the existing pool.