Finding it hard to cope with huge growth in its own storage requirements, managed services supplier Griffin wanted an enterprise grade storage solution for its four data centres. Adrian Sunderland, chief technology officer, says the problem was one of scale and administration.

‘We needed a storage platform that gave us the benefits of dynamic virtual storage and would allow us to junk the entire network-attached and direct-attached storage with its management and scalability issues,’ he says.

Griffin is already enjoying the benefits of lower cost per unit of storage, simple disaster recovery planning, ease of management and scalability since deploying three EqualLogic PS200E arrays with more than 16TB of storage in its data centres in London, Derby and Leicester.

EqualLogic’s virtualised San architecture is self-managing, continually backing up across the three locations for total business continuity.

‘Managing the storage now is a doddle,’ says Sunderland. ‘It is a web based application and you can manage volumes, increase sizes, mirror and replicate just with a few simple clicks, and if anything should fail the system simply contacts the vendor.’

Each array includes two spare disks, and in the event of a failure the system will rebuild itself from a spare disk and alert an engineer.

‘We have not had a failure yet,’ says Sunderland. ‘But we do know about the engineer.’ When rigorously testing the system, the team enthusiastically removed disk drives to check robustness and were startled when a panicking engineer appeared to replace the seemingly large number of failing drives.

‘That exercise certainly tested the system and we now know that it does indeed send out alarms that generate a prompt response,’ says Sunderland.

Scalability was a key concern for Griffin. When a customer, a scientific company with lots of research data that was separating from its parent company and moving to a new building, called up requiring 8TB of storage, Sunderland and his team were able to say yes immediately.

‘We do not actually have a spare 8TB of storage,’ says Sunderland.

‘However, because our storage solution is immensely scalable – up to 220TB in each group – we can add some more storage and take on the business. The drives are in stock and all it takes is the time to install an additional 10TB unit.’

The only challenge for the team will be physically moving the data from its existing location onto the new storage.

Sunderland does have one word of caution, saying: ‘Although storage virtualisation makes our lives easier, there is a risk to the business because we are now dependent on that system. It took us a long time to gain that confidence.’