• R/Evolution Storage Architecture
• Storage Hardware
• Storage Software
• Vertical Markets
• Library
  • White Papers
  • Case Studies
  • SAN Quick Reference Guide
  • SAN Tutorial

Case Studies

White Papers | Case Studies | SAN Quick Reference Guide | SAN Tutorial

Situation

Synapse Consulting is an IT consultancy providing managed business services and business continuity solutions across Europe to predominately blue-chip financial service organisations, which rely heavily on the Internet in the day-to-day running of the business. Any amount of down time (even a minute) can result in the loss of millions of pounds of revenue for its customers. Indirect losses can include decreased customer satisfaction and lost opportunity costs.

Five years ago Synapse Consulting recognised the unsuitability of traditional business continuity services and the necessity of zero-downtime for its technology dependant clients. As a result, the company implemented a technical business continuity platform, which, through real-time off-site replication and failover, provided Synapse clients with the reliable and flexible infrastructure they required. Banks, insurance companies and financial institutions quickly adopted the solution. As the volume of data grew, the solution needed to adhere to the storage and regulatory requirements of these markets. According to Colin Sheard (Director of Synapse Consulting), “As our clients businesses grew, the amount of information they needed to store and manage exploded.”

Action

As many of Synapse’s clients looked to improve the value of their IT infrastructure through server and storage consolidation, Synapse began to look for a replacement for its existing storage platform. One of the key influencers was enabling clients to combine the cost-effectiveness of a shared high-availability environment with their own virtualised infrastructure for maximum flexibility and cost reduction, though the consolidation of storage and server resources. The new platform allowed clients to fully virtualise global server and storage infrastructures, while simultaneously providing a geographically diversified business continuity service.

The nature of Synapse clients means that a wide range of systems and storage environments are utilised. Reliability, integration, support and cost were all ranked highly in the storage architecture selection process. After a lengthy evaluation process that involved several manufacturers, Synapse selected Dot Hill.

In selecting the storage solution, it was important that it would be expandable and technically straightforward to implement. Many of the solutions that were considered required specialist implementation, or the integration of a number of components to achieve the maximum flexibility; this resulted in these solutions being entirely unsuitable as part of a managed service where an in-depth understanding and control over every individual element is required. Sheard added, “We were impressed by the fact that we could take a Dot Hill SANnet II out of the box and in minutes be moving our data to it.”

Timing was critical. “We had been evaluating and testing the virtualisation solution for four months with outstanding results, so much so that it was decided to bring forward deployment by a full 12 months,” said Sheard. This resulted in a requirement to consolidate ten's of terabytes (TB) in a very short timescale, which was achieved by implementing Dot Hill’s SANnet® II SATA Special Edition storage solution.

From the outset, Dot Hill was very competitive on a price per TB basis. The factor that really drove the selection of Dot Hill however was the significant reduction in Total Cost of Ownership resulting from training, implementation, rack space, etc. Again, Dot Hill came out on top offering the lowest price per TB.

Implementing Dot Hill’s multiple SANnet II SAN as part of a business continuity infrastructure, provided the flexibility and performance required, at an extremely competitive cost. All major components in the SANnet II have automated failover and are fully redundant, making them the ideal selection in a highly virtualised business continuity environment.

Sheard concluded, “Our new platform, including the Dot Hill SANnet II delivers zero-downtime, while at the same time it allows Synapse, and its clients, to realise the many benefits of a fully virtualised server and storage infrastructure.”

Contacts