Global publishing group Elanders provides “infomedia” services for international brands such as IKEA, Nokia, Volvo, and Scania. In addition to publishing content in print and online, Elanders archives documents and images on systems at its main office and two remote sites. Elanders used technology from EMC for day-to-day storage, archiving, and back up. But in 2008, the technology was approaching the end of its lifecycle.

After researching the market thoroughly, Elanders decided to deploy a 66TB Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System at its main datacenter, and additional systems at the two remote offices, handling 23 TB each. The systems are based on industry standard components and a robust software stack built from OpenSolaris and running Solaris ZFS. The scalability of the new system was key to the organization's decision. The new Sun solution can easily be scaled to accommodate 576 TB of information. When deployment is complete, it will be possible to offer full replication of data between the main and remote offices.

Magnus Befwe, manager of IT Operations and Infrastructure at Elanders, says it is now much easier and faster to add capacity in increments. Thin provisioning technology helps Elanders to provide dynamic data storage for its customers and Befwe estimates that this solution gives Elanders ten times the capacity for growth than the previous environment.

“When we were using direct-attached disks, we had to work out well in advance the capacity for a given customer and then charge that company for blocks of storage," explained Befwe. "Now customers simply pay for what they use, which is a highly attractive sales model.”

This system has similar benefits for Elanders' IT team. Befwe says, “This solution allows us to keep all our data in one place, without the need for downtime or time-consuming relocation to larger volumes.” This manifests inconsiderable savings for Elanders' customers, which Befwe believes have come down by as much as 40%.

Additionally, with the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System being based on open technology, Sun doesn't charge Elanders additional license fees for protocols and data services. The technology also reduces costs by lowering power consumption and cooling requirements - SSDs consume about 80% less power than moving disks - and increasing storage density, which reduces space requirements. As such, with this solution, Elanders consumes up to 50% less power than with its previous technology.

The high availability and reliability of the new solution ensures the service Elanders needs for its business and customers. For example, it supports a two-node cluster configuration, which has no single point of failure, minimizing the risk of downtime. This level of availability was critical given that Elanders chose to utilize the solution for virtualization storage, with most of the VMware servers hosting business critical applications with 7x24 uptime demands. They currently have approximately 50 servers on five hosts in their VMware cluster. These are mostly Windows 2003 and 2008 servers, but include Linux platforms too. Elanders' applications range from front-end web servers to demanding applications like Microsoft Sharepoint and database servers.

Another feature highly regarded is the Sun Storage 7000's DTrace Analytics tool, which makes it easier to monitor performance. “It’s a delight to use,” says Befwe. “We spend less time reacting to the performance of the system and more time planning and supporting company strategy - overall administration time has fallen by 50%. From the team’s perspective, it means we can demonstrate the value of the investment to senior managers and prove our worth to the company.”

More Information

Customer Snapshot: Elanders AB

Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System

Solaris ZFS

VMware

Employing Open, Simple, and Scalable Storage

Sun Storage 7410 Configurations Based on Six-core AMD Opterons [...read more...]

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