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Current Filter: Storage>>>>>> Credit where it's due Editorial Type: Case Study Date: 05-2013 Views: 2892 | |||
| Ageing physical hardware growing daily in both complexity and cost - that was the challenge that faced the Irish League of Credit Unions when they elected to virtualise their estate. Today, the new virtual environment provides Disaster Recovery, Highly Performing Applications and at a 60% cost reduction to alternative storage environments The Irish League of Credit Unions (ILCU) represents 484 financial institutions across Ireland, with combined assets of 13.6 billion euros and membership of over 3 million in credit unions. Whilst independent, credit unions remain in the ownership of their members and are facilitated by common bonds to ensure that the savings of members are available to fellow members as loans. The ILCU was set up as an umbrella organisation to represent and provide joint services to the affiliated credit unions. Acting as a single consolidated body on a national level, the ILCU represents and provides expansive services including legal counsel, HR advice, joint advertising, professional services and ICT.
CUSTOM-MADE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT They turned to architecture advisor and Irish DataCore Gold partner, Typetec, who recommended and implemented VMware vSphere for server virtualisation to optimise the utilisation of common resources (CPUs and disks) and to readily redeploy these resources (servers and storage) when and where needed. Typetec also explained that VMware vSphere requires additional assistance to enable advanced functions such as workload migration, load balancing, fail-over and disaster recovery, and is completely dependent on highly available (HA) shared storage platform. They went on to introduce the concept of a storage hypervisor to ILCU - a portable, centrally-managed software package from DataCore that extends provisioning, replication and performance and acceleration services. To prove the concept of what could be achieved moving away from traditional Direct Attached Storage on a Storage Area Network (SAN), Typetec took the unusual step of creating ILCU's entire infrastructure within their own internal test and development lab. A pair of DataCore SANsymphony-V nodes were tested in a dual mirrored configuration, running on standard x86 Intel hardware. ILCU were invited for an interactive hands-on briefing session using the intuitive interface of SANsymphony-V to achieve automatic failover of both path and data through the DataCore Storage Hypervisor. With concepts proven and validating customer research into some of the 8000 DataCore global customers gained, installation commenced.
HEIGHTENED SECURITY
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