Storage upgrades in action

Guernsey-based Virgin Games has been providing online bingo, poker and other casino favourites to UK gamblers since 2004. It measures its success by the number of transactions it can process during any one end user session, and how fast the user can register with the site and verify their financial details for payment.

After moving its IT infrastructure back in-house in 2007, the firm needed to host the player-facing technology platform on its own storage systems, and invested in Pillar Data Systems’ Axiom RAID array for SQL databases, backup capacity and virtual servers. The load was originally split between a mixture of SATA and Fibre Channel (FC) hard disks, with solid state disk (SSD) units being added last year.

“It was more about performance rather than capacity. Our growth is about 2-3TB per year and we already had more storage than we needed [about 20TB in total],” says the company’s head of IT, Nico Van Der Westhuizen. “Because we were moving to highly transactional services we switched to using SSD storage.”

To date it is only the SQL database that requires random reads and writes, which is hosted on SSD that is better able to cope with its I/O demands. Pillar also supplies storage management software that helps Virgin Games staff create and delete snapshots, and mount logical unit numbers (LUNs) for backup and disaster recovery purposes, and provides trending tools that tell the IT department how much storage is being used and how many read and write I/Os each disk is processing.

“We have 300,000 money transactions a day coming in and out of the system – I/O traffic is dynamic so we put the SQL transactions on SSD, and split normal usage like backups and virtual servers across SATA and FC,” adds Marek Wisniewski, head of infrastructure at Virgin Games.

Because it processes credit card transactions and stores card numbers, Virgin Games is covered not only by PCI DSS rules but also regulations set out by the Alderney Gaming Commission, which maintains a register of e-gambling licences and certificates. As such, the company did not trust external service providers to host its data.

“We store lots of sensitive information so we were reluctant to explore putting data outside of what we have,” says Wisniewski. “With PCI DSS it is all about knowing the data is safe, so we use encryption on our database layer and have lots of security around who can access it.”
Single tape architecture

The London Clinic (pictured above) is in the middle of a storage management upgrade project that IT director Mike Roberts hopes will ensure continuity and improve availability.

“The whole idea of backup, disaster recovery and archiving for me is more of a continuum – I need a set of data that will always be available,” he says.

Roberts is candid about the methods he uses to estimate data storage growth: “Up until now the only way to assess it is to extrapolate on how big an image set the new modality asks for and what patient records are associated with that – going through this exercise will allow me to be more scientific in making those calculations.

“The SAN hardware vendors have their hands in my wallet permanently and if I can manage that expectation, I can reduce the cost of maintaining the SAN.

“Our strategy is to move to a single tape architecture – at the moment we have different applications using different tape drivers doing different jobs.

“I want to get to a situation where we have a single tape box with a single tape set for long-term archive.”