The UK's primary garden charity is building a centralised storage infrastructure to improve its disaster recovery times.

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), which is responsible for flagship events like the Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower shows, has signed a deal with supplier Compellent covering seven separate sites, 40 servers and 600 PCs.

All systems will be linked to a central database containing 200,000 high-resolution horticultural images stored across two 12 terabyte storage area networks (SANs) .

The RHS chose the system because of the ability to mix high-speed Fibre Channel drives alongside low-cost SATA disks to provide a more flexible cost-versus-performance argument.

And by running a second SAN purely on low-cost SATA drives, the RHS saved a significant amount of money, not least by obviating the need for a dedicated administrator.

Server recovery time has also been cut from 12 days to 24 hours.