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Case Studies | Telecommunications
Fujitsu Telecommunication Europe Ltd. 
Fujitsu Telecommunication Europe Ltd. (FTEL) is a leading manufacturer of fixed access telecommunications equipment. Based in Birmingham and Belfast in the United Kingdom, FTEL specialises in research and development, design and supply of high quality telecommunications products and services including the FDX-Access family of broadband products for ADSL and ASDH for residential, SME and large enterprise use. FTEL's core customers are telecommunications service providers requiring state of the art equipment to ensure their own customer service levels.The Challenge With a growing heterogeneous server environment running Oracle, Clearcase, desktop and in-house hardware and software development applications, FTEL realised that there was a need for deploying a dynamic and flexible storage environment. The existing storage solution was a combination of Network Attached Storage (NAS) and direct attached storage. Although they were very content with the ability of NAS to meet their file sharing requirements, FTEL identified the need to eliminate the poor scalability, complex backup processes and limited availability of direct attached storage to satisfy their 24x7 operation. In addition, the desire to mirror data across the campus in a cost effective manner, improve application I/O throughput performance and implement a centralised storage management capability helped drive investigation of alternative solutions. The Solution During a period where various proposed solutions under consideration were either too expensive, too proprietary or functionally inadequate, FTEL was contacted by DataCore and introduced to SANsymphony's advanced storage networking and management software. Ian Batten, FTEL's IT Director, explained, "The DataCore solution appeared to offer many of the aspects that were missing from other options, such as block level snapshot, easier device sharing, single point of administration, better caching and the prospect of interesting solutions to the backup issue." FTEL decided to evaluate SANsymphony utilising commodity RAID devices for storage. With even relatively low-end storage, the results were impressive enough that the solution moved forward into a production environment. How did you learn about DataCore? The business development manager for Datacore Software was a long-standing contact whom we had dealt with previously. He introduced us to the storage virtualisation concept that SANsymphony provided at a time when we were re-assessing our approach to storage management. How many other solutions were considered? How long was the selection process? We considered the purchase of an EMC storage array until we saw the bottom line of the quote. We couldn't see how to justify such an expense, while SANsymphony could enable us to deploy a similar solution with comparable functionality, but through the use of much lower cost, commodity based equipment. Our negotiating power and purchasing flexibility expanded tremendously, allowing us to choose from a much broader marketplace of hardware. Why did you choose a Datacore solution? We were trying to address the management problems we had been experiencing with our direct-attached storage environment. It was extremely cumbersome. By comparison, we had been pleased with many aspects of our existing NAS solution, particularly with the ability to manage data centrally with a consistent set of tools. We wanted to duplicate that management ease on a block level. SANsymphony offered, at data block level, the same type of manageability, flexibility, uniformity and ease of use. This was a primary requirement, considering all the difficulty we were experiencing in managing and fully utilizing our direct-attached disks previously. What is your hardware environment? Compaq servers are used as the SANsymphony storage domain servers. These are serving storage to Sun application servers running the Solaris operating system and Solstice Disk Suite. SAN fabric switches are from Brocade with fibre channel HBAs from JNI in the Solaris systems and QLogic in the SDS nodes. What are you doing with your storage network? What are you managing? Applications include Clearcase software development databases and Oracle. SANsymphony is providing the underlying storage for these applications. Programming staff developing the software for the FTEL products rely on this data daily. It is critical data for our ongoing product development environment. How much data are you currently storing? The SANsymphony configuration consists of half a terabyte of specifically purchased underlying RAID disk storage. We also have a number of legacy DAS devices, which we know can be added to the storage pool and are considering doing so to maximise our use of available storage for minimum outlay and to easily accommodate the expected growth in data. What in your mind are the benefits of SANsymphony? What do you like best? We have found that the SANsymphony environment delivers a number of real benefits. Reliability and ease of management have been key, with little administrative overhead required to maintain the configuration. We no longer have to use multiple complex LUN partitioning tools-that alone is a real time saver. This translates into overall lower total cost of ownership and a positive effect on both personnel and the bottom line. We have also been particularly impressed by the performance the system delivers with its caching features. From relatively low cost components we have a solution that can match the performance of much more expensive solutions. The added responsiveness of our applications in turn enables us to conduct our operations more efficiently and achieve higher return on investment.
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