Compellent Fluid Data Storage is Head of Class for Dutch Education Executive
Virtualisation became the main driver behind DUO’s decision to deploy new storage technology. In 2004 DUO decided to run new, self-built Java applications on virtualised Windows servers. With that decision the SAN providing storage for these servers became critical for DUO’s online applications, and therefore an essential part of achieving DUO’s primary business goal: to make things easier for end customers.
Additionally, in 2005, the European Union (EU) passed a number of regulations that increased the workload for DUO. A court directive determined that a citizen of the EU has the enduring right of residence in another member state if he or she “has stayed legally on the territory of the host country for a continuous period of five years.” This means that students from other EU member states who have lived in The Netherlands for five consecutive years are entitled to a study grant or a contribution toward their study costs. Since this directive came into play, the workload for DUO has increased tremendously, with the added load of many thousands of new study grants.
Poor grades given to DUO’s IBM-based SAN
Dating back to before the new EU regulations, DUO ran its storage operations on a SAN that consisted of five IBM DS4800 Fibre Channel storage systems and a number of Cisco MDS switches. Attached to the SAN were more than 400 Windows servers of various makes and models. Over time, however, the existing SAN became a weak point in DUO’s operation—a major problem for this critical and highly visible organisation.
“We were inflexible in our response to customer needs,” says Frank Wilbrink, DUO’s infrastructure architect. “Despite our large investment, we continued to suffer from performance issues, such as file access processes. The subsystems were unreliable, and we had unexpected and unexplained downtime. This was an untenable situation, because the most important thing for us is to do the job without getting attention from the press or the minister.” Adding to the problem, DUO’s storage engineers found it difficult to maintain the storage systems. For example, they were not able to accurately track storage usage, and the RAID configuration became a recurring problem. In addition, the organisation had no working disaster recovery solution, a critical element when managing thousands of student loans.
With so many programs and student loans to manage, taking down the SAN for maintenance was no longer a viable option. Many of DUO’s transactions take place on the Internet, so its systems must be available 24x7. However, servicing the SAN required many hours of downtime. As an organisation responsible to the minister, DUO’s mission included responding quickly to incoming calls. But with unreliable and sometimes unusable storage systems, maintaining this degree of responsiveness was becoming difficult, and the organisation’s planned and unplanned system outages made the task even more difficult. The final straw came early in 2010, when an unexpected subsystem failure took more than half of DUO’s servers offline.
Compellent Fluid Data storage passes difficult test
As a result, the DUO team initiated a search to replace the existing IBM DS4800 storage systems. According to Wilbrink, the main goal was to find a replacement configuration that required no planned downtime, was highly flexible, would provide high performance and could be easily managed. After an in-depth evaluation, the DUO chose Compellent Fluid Data storage. The Compellent solution met all of DUO’s criteria, including minimizing planned downtime, providing high performance, and avoiding bottlenecks resulting from RAID configuration.
While making the decision to purchase Compellent, DUO was determined to put the equipment through its paces to ensure it was bulletproof. It asked ISSUE Information Technology, the solutions provider that initially recommended Compellent, to invite Compellent to DUO’s premises to conduct some rigorous testing. With the systems operational, they pulled out power supplies, ripped physical connections and even unplugged controllers. Needless to say, the Compellent system coped perfectly and DUO was duly impressed.
Today, DUO operates two identical Compellent Fluid Data Storage systems—one in the organisation’s main data centre and the other at a separate site over 17 kilometres away, connected with a fibre link. Compellent Remote Instant Replay replication operates seamlessly within a live production environment, whereas DUO’s previous IBM system required a separate SAN and Fibre Channel host bus adaptor (HBA) dedicated to the replication effort.
Each system has a total capacity of 80TB, split into eight shelves of 15K Fibre Channel disks and three shelves of SATA. Each system is currently loaded at around half capacity with data generated by numerous enterprise applications, such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Database clusters, Microsoft Exchange Server and a wide variety of Windows-based servers. DUO employs VMware vSphere virtualisation, with the main Compellent system currently attached to 24 physical ESX servers and around 420 virtual machines. DUO primarily operates on Windows Server and Powersystems, as well as some Linux servers. The whole implementation went live under budget and in time within just six weeks.
Satisfaction delivered through integrated functionality
The key Compellent feature that was particularly attractive to DUO and proved to be very successful is Data Progression, Automated Tiered Storage software. “Automated tiering is an excellent fit for DUO because it is so flexible,” says Maarten Carlier from ISSUE Information Technology. “They can utilize different tiers for the process of developing, testing and executing applications within the production cycle. This process would be impossible to manage manually, and with the previous IBM storage system, exact application copies would have had to be created, manipulated and thrown away repeatedly. With Compellent, DUO can make snapshots and clones of development in seconds rather than wasting hours copying production databases. The storage pools are so flexible, and when the space is finished and deleted, it simply returns to the disk pool and the capacity is ready to be reused immediately.”
Other features that have proven useful include Thin Import, which was utilized during the SAN migration process itself, and Live Volume, an automated business continuity feature that allows DUO to virtually move storage volumes anywhere on its network—even as users move application data from one physical server or VM to another for development. This live transfer of data makes it easier to manage resources regardless of their physical location. DUO believes Live Volume will only grow in importance for the organisation in the future as data storage manipulation demands increase even further.
Wilbrink is also happy with Compellent Copilot Support and Services. “It’s such a relief to have a storage organisation that has a focus not only on helping its customers with problems, but feels responsible for its products,” Wilbrink says. “We are pleased with the Fluid Data storage system. It’s easy to manage and there’s been no downtime. And the excellent communication and interaction between Compellent, our partner ISSUE and ourselves has justified this key technology decision.”
