We provide a virtual storage
solution that
provides 24/7
protection and
Disaster Recovery
Brief:
This leading logistics
company, needed to
strengthen business
processes that are
dependant on key
applications through
a virtual storage
solution that
provides 24/7
protection and
Disaster Recovery.
Challenge
The IT systems in European Worldwide Logistics are based
in Erith, but applications are delivered out to all sites
over a Wide Area Network.
The current production server estate is based on physical
servers and application availability is dependent on
Individual server reliability.
Recent contract wins and business growth has established a
need to strengthen business processes dependant on key
applications that are in use around the clock even if the IT
department is not permanently manned 24/7.
Europa Worldwide Logistics also wanted to be able to
implement a Disaster Recovery solution for protection
against site wide problems such as fire, flood, loss of power,
loss of access to premises due to or localised incidents
Solution:
Enables IT chose VMware as the server virtualisation
platform. VMware are the world’s leading provider of
virtualisation solutions for x86-based servers, and have a
mature and trusted product in this market.
The server estate was virtualised using the VMware
Essentials Plus bundle. This provides the capability to
virtualise the current server estate and still have sufficient
capacity for growth as it contains enough licences for three
servers, each capable of dual processors with multiple
cores.
The VMware Essentials Plus bundle also includes High
Availability (HA) which protects applications from server
failure as long as shared storage is in place.
As part of the solution, a Dell Equallogic iSCSI SAN
solution was provided which was connected to the server
estate using a dedicated GB iSCSI storage network
connected by multiple gigabit switches, eliminating single
point of failure. This ensures any physical server can
provide the required services, and protect against any
downtime or failure.
Benefits
The solution was delivered to ensure maximum server
resilience to provide continuity of business critical
applications.
The benefits of the virtualised iSCSI SAN solution include:
- Increased resilience
- Maximised disk performance and utilisation
- Lower recovery point through snapshots
- Money saved on powering and cooling data centre
- Easily scalable
- Option to replicate to geographically diverse site for
Disaster Recovery
- Centrally managed
- Ease of deployment
- 60-80% utilisation for x86-based servers (up from
today’s typical 5-15%)
- Just-in-time provisioning of additional resources to
applications
- Provisioning times for change requests managed in
minutes
- Minimal downtime on hardware maintenance without
waiting for maintenance windows
- Unified server provisioning, monitoring and resource
allocation across multiple generations of Windows and
Linux servers
- Build consistency across systems
