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Tim Olsson is the IT Manager gearing up to support the forthcoming 5.5 billion euros construction of the 18km immersed underwater tunnel linking Denmark to Germany, due for completion in 2021: "We are in the process of commencing 4 major construction contracts this summer to facilitate the start of the build of the Fehmarnbelt tunnel. The number of employees will start to escalate dramatically as we progress through the build; as well as the volume of CAD intensive documents and building designs and engineering specifications that will need to be accessed on the network."

Femern began the process of examining the present infrastructure and anticipating how it would scale as the construction progressed. Within their Copenhagen data centre, Femern operated a Dell EqualLogic SAN that was reaching end of life. With spare parts becoming increasingly hard to obtain and when new replacement drives did arrive, there were frequent incidences of premature failure.

The organisation had already adopted virtualisation, with critical apps running virtualised on VMware, but they appeared slow due to disk I/O bottlenecks as workloads contended for the challenged EqualLogic storage. This was therefore not a time to simply add disk, but an opportunity for an entire overhaul to an alternative software defined SAN and infrastructure, as Olsson explains: "We felt certain that even if we considered an upgraded EqualLogic box we would still be constrained by hardware rigidity and lacking the impending scalability and flexibility required to accommodate the various construction phases." Femern consulted their IT supplier, COMM2IG, to make an official technical proposal on alternatives.

COMM2IG recommended DataCore's SANsymphony-V software storage hypervisor to robustly support the latest version of VMware's Vsphere delivering their Tier 1 applications virtually. To help overcome performance issues, COMM2IG recommended that Femern incorporate flash-based Fusion-io technology for their most important applications to achieve far faster speeds than from spinning disks and to overcome performance bottlenecks.

Two DataCore SANsymphony-V nodes were implemented on two HP DL380 G7 servers. Each server was provisioned with two CPUs, 96GB of RAM for super caching performance boost and 320GB Fusion-io PCIe ioDrive2 cards for flash integration in the storage pool as part of a hybrid, automatically tiered storage configuration. VMware's server virtualisation was upgraded to VMware vSphere 5.1. Overall, the environment offered 50TB of mirrored storage based on HP direct-attached SAS & SATA drives augmented by a flash storage layer. Use of the Fusion acceleration cards would be optimised through DataCore's auto tiering capabilities; reserving the more expensive flash storage layer for the most demanding applications and ensuring that other, less accessed data, be relocated automatically to Femern's existing SAS and SATA based storage enabling a 1/2/3 auto tiered environment.

RESULTS
Some twelve months down the line Femern are well placed to comment on the success of their software defined data centre. Most noticeable is the increased performance of their Microsoft SQL applications which struggled with latency issues previously.

"From a user perspective, they used to experience slow response times and a performance lag from their Microsoft SQL & Exchange applications running virtually on VMware," says Olsson. "Today, and in the future, with DataCore in the background, the applications appear robust, instantaneous and seamless. We have achieved this without the cost prohibitive price tag of pure flash. That's what any IT department strives to achieve."

As the data volumes increase up to tenfold as construction starts in 2015, intelligent allocations to flash will increase the lifespan of the Fusion-ioDrive and significantly offset the overall cost of ownership, delivering less critical data to the most cost effective tier that can deliver acceptable performance. With this multi-faceted approach to storage allocation using DataCore's SANsymphony-V solution, Femern is able to manage all devices under one management interface; regardless of brand and type.

Olsson concludes: "What we have achieved here with DataCore storage virtualisation software sets us on the road to affordable, flexible growth to eliminate storage related downtime. Add the blistering speed of Fusion-io acceleration and we have created a super performing, auto tiered storage network that does as the tunnel itself will do; connects others reliably, super fast and without stoppages."
More info: www.datacore.com