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JKR is a globally recognised packaging design specialist with offices in London, New York and Singapore. It has a track record of providing excellent design and brand realisation spanning more than 20 years. JKR currently works with more than 75 of the top 500 brands in the world.

The company describes itself thus on its website: "We're a global design agency with 24 years of experience in creating brand growth through the medium of design. We help brands get noticed and chosen by amplifying and celebrating what makes them unique and charismatic. We call it Brand First. No matter what the context, category or market, the philosophy remains the same. Brand First design gets you noticed, and charisma gets you chosen."

JKR was entirely Mac based before selecting Huawei as its storage and server supplier. However the Mac servers were coming to end of life, and Apple's development attention had shifted to its consumer products such as the iPad and iPhone. So JKR decided to move to a Windows based storage and server infrastructure and started the hunt for a supplier.

Like any other area of a thriving business, IT needs to be cost efficient, both when major upgrades are taking place and on a day to day basis. The IT function is not income generating, but it can help the business bottom line by being as financially efficient as possible. The perfect balance is struck when financial efficiency and optimal performance coincide, and that is what JKR was looking for - and found - when it chose Huawei for a major systems upgrade.

KEY CHALLENGES
JKR is a business which can't function if its IT infrastructure is compromised. Even a short period of downtime could not only be a deal-breaker for a specific piece of work, but could damage the company's outstanding reputation. Reliability and excellent technical support were both vital for the new system selected.

Designers work in a range of data hungry media including animations, video, 3D structures and more, and so files can be very large - 20GB is not unusual. A key driver for upgrading IT was that the existing SAN was simply running out of storage space. The storage need was made greater by the implementation of a cascade style series of closed systems. Inevitably key files are moved between 'stages' in the system by end users. Head of IT, Stuart Colledge, analysed workflows before specifying the new system, and identified the need for a system that could accommodate this style of working.

As part of the preparation for implementing the new IT infrastructure, Colledge estimated data growth of 10TB a year; but that proved to be an underestimate. Thankfully, Colledge has found the Huawei systems implemented are perfectly hospitable to greater levels of expansion than he had estimated.

Speed of access is also vital. Any new system implemented needed to be capable of serving up large files very quickly. No designer would want to wait for data to come to them.

SOLUTION
The solution chosen by JKR was based around the new OceanStor S5500T with a Fibre Channel connection to servers and Ethernet to end user desktop computers. This combination provides fast, secure access to the large data files that are so important to JKR's everyday work.

The OceanStor S5500T is designed to support business development, growing as the business need develops. Key features include converged architecture, protocols, and platforms. So, it can support multiple storage networking modes and protocols, including iSCSI, FC, NFS, CIFS, HTTP, and FTP, integrates SAN and NAS protocols, and supports both structured and unstructured data.

The solution included both iSCSI and Fibre Channel ports catering for flexibility between use of the two systems. The system also included 24 600GB Serial Attached SCSI drives, with a proportion of these to be used as spare drives, and SSD drives to function as Smart Cache. This last component was chosen as part of the mix to help ensure end users' fast access to the large data files that are essential to their work.

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