FUJIFILM Focuses on DataCore's SANmelody for Storage Virtualization Cost Savings and Disaster Recovery

“Consolidation was becoming increasingly necessary to stem the pressure on the team having to backup, manage and ultimately move redundant servers,” stated 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.”

Rollout commenced in March 2008 and within two months all major applications were transferred onto the 12 virtual servers. The network carries 3.4 TB of data – with a further 50% expansion remaining available. Installation was a seamless and relatively painless process noted Manish. “Within just 2-3 hours we had an operational business continuity and disaster recovery solution up and running,” he said. “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.”

In addition, there have been notable financial benefits in terms of cost savings managing the new virtualized data center environment. The team has equated the reduction of costs for the entire virtualization campaign to be roughly $75,000 to over $100,000 per annum – in terms of reduction of man days for management and maintenance.

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/07/01/fujifilm-uk-focuses-on-datacore-s-sanmelody-for-storage-virtualization-cost-savings-and-disaster-recovery.aspx