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Mole Valley District Council provides its 87,000 population with the full portfolio of local government services, from Housing Benefits to waste management provision. Within the Council, IT Service Design Manager, Saeed Foroughi, ensures that the near 300 internal council customers have full access to an optimal infrastructure; applications and IT services, to fulfil their busy roles from within the Dorking based IT Department.

THE VIRTUALISATION JOURNEY
The Council today operates in a virtualised server and storage environment, having gone through the consolidation journey from physical to virtual five years ago, with the assistance and advice of trusted DataCore certified partner, Adapto. Back then, the landscape looked somewhat different, with over 90 physical servers running alongside HP direct attached storage. Adapto and Mole Valley commenced a complete landscape refresh to stem hardware haemorrhage. Today, the consolidated server rooms hold just 30 physical servers alongside 100 VMs running VMware ESX server virtualisation platform with DataCore's SANsymphony-V software defined storage platform robustly supporting the virtual landscape, synchronously mirrored across 2 nodes in a high availability configuration, with a third asynchronous offsite replication location for Disaster Recovery.

Saeed comments. "We have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with DataCore that spans across many years, way before Software Defined Storage (SDS) became a mainstream term, after we realised even then that the clever part of storage emanates almost entirely from the software layer. The primary reasons that we selected SANsymphony-V in the first place haven't really changed from what we experience today - to ultimately decrease cost and increase scalability and reliability. Adoption of DataCore's SDS platform has kept us away from costly hardware refreshes and endless cycle of appliance purchasing and today we have complete freedom of choice as to which disk we provision, so we select disk that is entirely suited to task and not to incumbent brand."

COMPROMISE IS NOT AN OPTION
DataCore's first SANsymphony solution was installed and configured a number of years back as a two node synchronous mirrored configuration which supports automated failover and failback, assuring high availability of critical applications should either side of the mirror fail. Running on a pair of rack mounted HP ProLiant DL 380 servers with Windows Server 2008 R2, Mole Valley's core 25TB of data remains fully protected assured, and highly performant.

Saeed notes. "We support over 50 essential applications across the various parts of the Council, most of which are deemed critical to successful civic operations. With such a number of departmental applications, performance and resiliency cannot be compromised. Failover, when it has occurred, remains seamless and automatic, with the other side of the mirror resuming the primary load and no disruption to services. The process is so seamless that frequently Mole Valley only notice that it has happened when a visual inspection highlights that the transition has occurred. That's software defined working at its best."

PERFORMANCE AND PURCHASING POWER
With over 50 applications supported, for speed of processing of applications and data reporting, SANsymphony-V continues to enhance the internal user experience by using caching to overcome I/O bottlenecks and help the Mole Valley applications to run faster. This is achieved using multi-threaded caching algorithms - data written to, or read from, disks moves swiftly into and out of the DRAM caches, harnessing the full potential of each node's high-speed multi-processors.

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