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Business Solutions Powered by DataCore™ PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium (http://www.pwcglobal.com) is the world's largest professional services organization offering a range of products including assurance, global risk management, corporate finance, tax and accountancy services. PricewaterhouseCoopers help their clients solve complex business problems and enhance their ability to build value, manage risk, and improve performance in an Internet-enabled world. PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium is dedicated to providing high quality services to organizations varying from top-tier multinationals to medium and smaller sized enterprises and ranks as number one on the Belgium audit market. PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium Internal IT provides project management, application development and systems administration services with its team of 40 engineers to some 1500 users. The Challenge PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium's growth in data was leading to multiple problems in meeting demand. Some problems were a result of Operating System limitations and others were due to storage device limitations. Managing the storage was getting more and more time consuming and storage utilisation was becoming less efficient with an estimated 25% of the total storage being wasted. The challenge was to grow storage with a free vendor choice, utilize storage more efficiently and easily manage the changing storage demands. In addition any new storage environment implemented would have to ensure high availability of data to the application servers while not imposing any changes on the existing standard configurations such as RAID5 and fibre channel switches which had proved reliable over a number of years. The Solution Following a thorough analysis of available solutions, including an ROI study, PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium Internal IT chose to implement DataCore's SANsymphony™ solution. In particular SANsymphony's unique Network Managed Volumes (NMV) feature, delivering automatic storage on demand on a just in time basis without manual intervention of any kind will ensure that utilization of storage is increased to much higher levels, will reduce administrative effort on the application servers and reduce storage related downtime. "SANsymphony will enable us to reduce storage management costs, improve utilization of storage with greater flexibility and reliability while improving the efficiency of our backup," comments Mathieu Philippart, Project Leader and Principal IT Engineer. SANsymphony's open storage networking approach has enabled PricewaterhouseCoopers Belgium internal infrastructure to maintain its present investment in server, storage and networking hardware, and backup software, while adding real value through new functionality and centralized management. An Interview with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Belgium: What are your main data storage challenges? Our main challenges are to improve our storage infrastructure in terms of management, backup and utilization, while keeping an open system permitting us to evolve quickly and efficiently. We are also working on providing disaster recovery solutions based on snapshot and mirroring technologies. How did you learn about DataCore? We were in the market analysis phase and were collecting information on all companies providing storage management and virtualization solutions. DataCore was one of the companies we found who could solve our problems. The first real contact was made during the Storage Expo 2001 event in Birmingham, England. Why did you choose a DataCore solution? DataCore's SANsymphony was a good choice taking into account our specific internal IT specific environment, while maintaining full independence from the underlying storage devices. SANsymphony was also a solution with a proven track record. What is your SAN hardware environment? We are using Compaq RA-8000 and EMA-12000 storage arrays. Most of our application servers are running Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Netware 5.1. We have two SDS servers running Windows 2000. These machines are dual Xeon processor machines with 1.2GB of RAM. They have one Emulex and one Q-Logic HBA each. We use Compaq fibre channel switches and all cabling is fibre-optic. What applications are running on the servers using SANsymphony storage? Most of the servers are running Lotus Domino under Windows 2000, but we also have four Netware file and print servers and two Oracle/SAP servers running under Windows 2000. What are you doing with your SANsymphony installation? What are you managing? We manage all the storage for Windows 2000 Domino servers and Netware servers. All application server access to the storage arrays is through SANsymphony. We are also running a Windows 2000 SAP server on top of SANsymphony supplied storage. We are planning to integrate SANsymphony snapshot with our backup system to provide LAN and application server free backup capability. How much storage are you planning to manage with SANsymphony? At the moment we are planning to manage 3TB, but this is likely grow a lot in the near future and we needed a solution that would be able to scale as our storage capacity grows. What do you like best about SANsymphony? The Network Managed Volumes (NMVs) is really a great feature providing storage on demand seamlessly and automatically. Combined with snapshot we will get a very cost effective solution for backup.
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