Unilever boosts storage efficiency

Unilever has deployed NetWisdom SAN management software

Managing five petabytes of storage and its fibre channel (FC) network connectivity is no trivial task, as brand giant Unilever found out when it began to look for a management system for its storage area network (SAN). The network underpins all its business divisions across the globe.

Failing to properly manage even a small amount of storage can create all sorts of problems, as Unilever's enterprise services director, Mike Royle, explained: "Managing a SAN of any size can be highly problematic because it's often impossible to tell where the bottlenecks are."

Scale this up to a company of Unilever’s size and breadth, with a predicted annual storage growth approaching 50 per cent, and poor management of a SAN could cost the company millions of euros – which, as Royle explained, is simply unacceptable.

With Unilever's SAN environment approaching a virtualisation level of 95 per cent, the resulting management complexity meant that Unilever needed to find a system that gave it visibility into when and where performance problems might arise.

When it began its search, Unilever looked at solutions from vendors whose storage and systems it had previously deployed, but none was able to provide the real-time and historical optimisation data the company was looking for.

Unilever eventually settled on Virtual Instrument's NetWisdom SAN monitoring solution. Implementation took place in June and was quickly followed by staff training, and NetWisdom now monitors Unilever's fabrics in real-time across both UK datacentres.

Unilever's rollout uses Virtual Instruments' intelligent switch hardware for catching FC network traffic from a number of test access points (TAPs) and probes. The traffic data is collated and can be accessed through a portal service.

Unilever enterprise hosting manager John Delooze said: "As the system is monitoring traffic, it’s also registering how the FC fabric is performing."

Unilever’s Unix and integrated storage manager Paul Faid added: "NetWisdom is not just about real-time monitoring, it’s also great for measuring trends, so we can see how our storage capacity changes over time, which allows us to manage future storage and other hardware requirements in a far more comprehensive manner."

Asked whether the system could be used for environmental monitoring, Royle said, "No, but since it's supporting our decision making regarding future storage requirements, we will be getting green IT benefits."

Faid also pointed out that driving up SAN utilisation through use of the NetWisdom toolset would deliver further green IT benefits.

"Making sure that ports are utilised properly will mean we might be able to reduce switch port counts, giving reduced power consumption, which would reduce the need for cooling." added Faid.

Faid explained that Unilever started moving its remote services centres into its twin UK replicated datacentres about six years ago.

“At the time, the storage infrastructure consisted of discrete components attached to the servers, but over the years, we've developed our SAN, and a number of associated network fabrics,” said Faid.

Faid said: “Whenever we had issues prior to the installation of NetWisdom we needed to gather a lot of data from switches, which made it very time consuming to do any type of analysis work.”

The NetWisdom deployment has also saved Unilever considerable time and manpower. "We’ve seen about a 75 per cent reduction in our high-alert incident rate, and there has been a significant reduction in IT staff required to manage the SAN, allowing us to deploy them on other tasks," Faid said.

Delooze predicts a busy future for its NetWisdom deployment. "We’ve established this as the major building block for consulting on any new SAN infrastructure we need to deploy. We're not going to be playing catch up again in the future," he said.