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Taking the heat off

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 09-2015    Views: 2103      





PCI-e flash has been used to turbo boost flagging IOPS and propel OGN Group's highly virtualised data centre into the next gear

Offshore Group Newcastle Limited's (OGN) Tyneside facility near Newcastle provides engineering, procurement and construction services to the world's leading oil and gas and renewable energy companies. In doing so, OGN recommends and implements the most effective and cost efficient solutions for UK offshore construction and planning, using an integrated approach to engineering, project management and construction. Providing such levels of support requires OGN to remain at the forefront of innovation and engineering excellence. As a result, OGN's data centres stand well equipped, future-proofed and consolidated within the landmark 32 hectare Head Quarters in Wallsend. Fully virtualised and filled with VMware virtual hosts sharing fibre channel storage, the IT Department offers multiple data intensive applications from offshore planning to business critical infrastructure applications such as SQL and ERP.

GROWING PAINS
But there was an infrastructure problem emerging from within. As the growth of the company had blossomed with prestigious contract wins, so too had the pressure upon IT increased. This manifested with the company moving to 24 hour operations, removing any maintenance or downtime windows. User demands also increased exponentially, with users experiencing intermittent performance issues at essential demand and mining times throughout the day and night. Expansion of the company's SAP ERP platform alongside Microsoft Exchange, SQL databases and file servers, were squeezing the storage infrastructure to such an extent that bottlenecks were becoming more commonplace.

OGN contacted Waterstons, a trusted DataCore local Gold Partner and experts in affordable performance improvement to advise on the next critical steps in evolution. Simon Birbeck, Executive Consultant at Waterstons, takes up the story: "The problem we tracked at OGN manifested entirely from ongoing successful business growth. The modern, highly virtualised VMware ESX environment that had been executed meticulously a few years back had now grown to such a size that it could no longer cope with the demands the business placed on the burgeoning critical applications. The virtualised infrastructure needed a turbo boost to cope with business growth and fast."

TURBO-CHARGING VIRTUAL ASSETS
OGN already had a metro-cluster that was synchronously mirroring storage; the stretch cluster running between a pair of SANsymphony-V DataCore nodes of Dell T620 commodity servers and MD1220 direct-attached storage, with a fully redundant 8Gbps Brocade fibre channel fabric running through the iconic site. This provided the business with continuous availability even during data centre maintenance windows, with a 'no single point of failure' design.

Waterstons recommended a straightforward and immediate turbo charge of the Head Office virtual assets with the simple and relatively low cost addition of a new storage tier. This involved an upgrade of both DataCore storage server nodes with a Micron P420m PCI-e flash card, implemented during the working business day. This would provide a further 1400GB of very low latency storage, with Auto Tiering from flash set to automatically maintain the production working data set flow across all key virtual machines and adapting continuously to changes - seamlessly entailing that the right data is assigned to the right storage.

EYES ON THE IOPS PRIZE
After install, all eyes turned to see how the extra flash IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second - the measurement of storage performance) would perform handling Line of Business applications in the turbo charged environment. Approaching a million IOPs, the Team realised they had executed one of the fastest infrastructure performance improvement projects with little outlay and infrastructure overhead.

"By utilising 'off-the-shelf' components in a creative DataCore/Micron solution, Waterstons were able to dramatically increase performance of our systems across the board," Jonathan Taylor, Corporate Head of IT, OGN observed. "Crucially, the performance lift was sufficient to enable us to defer adoption of costly 'in memory' ERP appliances, at least until that technology becomes suitably mature."

Deployment of the combined DataCore and Micron solution continues to provide OGN with faster delivery of their Tier 1 apps together with continuous availability for users, overcoming the performance and availability issues that stemmed from competition of shared storage resources.

Simon Birbeck concludes:"OGN's IOPS counts showed even greater performance improvements than we had initially envisaged. And these weren't just benchmark figures. Six months down the line, OGN continues to enjoy lightning fast storage response for their line of business applications which helps to give them a competitive edge. In their 24/7 world, they now run to a backdrop of zero downtime as storage is empowered to synchronously drop in even in the event of a data centre outage."
More info: www.datacore.com

"OGN's IOPS counts showed even greater performance improvements than we had initially envisaged. And these weren't just benchmark figures. Six months down the line, OGN continues to enjoy lightning fast storage response for their line of business applications which helps to give them a competitive edge. In their 24/7 world, they now run to a backdrop of zero downtime as storage is empowered to synchronously drop in even in the event of a data centre outage."

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