Martin Meldrum, IT technical consultant at Norwich Union Australia, said that added to this massive data growth, local disk storage was exceeded, and there was a lack of redundant fabric for high availability. To manage its storage, the company opted for a Storage Area Network (SAN).
The company already had two existing Brocade 2800 switches running at capacity and one of the issues it had to explore was the complexity of adding additional 2800 switches into its environment.
Meldrum said two staff members worked on the rollout of the new SAN, putting in about 150 hours between them on the project.
Although he wouldn't cite an exact cost for the SAN implementation, Meldrum indicated the company had spent close to AU$1 million on hardware.
Norwich Union Australia opted to expand its existing Brocade SAN by adding a Brocade SilkWorm 12000 core fabric switch to the fibre channel switches.
All this was then connected to the firm's IBM LTO and HDS 9970v tape drives, which were running in a Solaris, Windows NT and Netware environment. IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager was used as the SAN management tool.
Among the reasons Norwich Union opted for SAN as its storage solution was that it allowed the firm to utilise existing storage resources, and also maintain continuous access to data, according to information provided by the company.
The firm estimates that benefits of the SAN implementation has seen it achieve 99.95 percent internal-systems uptime, a back-up window shortened from six to four hours, a 30 percent increase in storage utilisation, and a 15 to 20 percent reduction in hardware maintenance.
Redundancy of the new SAN also meant fault tolerance and service disruption for server and storage upgrades was minimised, according to the company.
Meldrum said the biggest problem during the rollout had been getting downtime for the servers. He said the team had taken the servers down for an average of four hours at a time, and tended to work through the night to minimise disruption to other staff.
Meldrum revealed Norwich Union Australia planned to continue storage consolidation of its production servers, in the future, from local disk to SAN, to free up local disk for development servers.
He believed that installing the SAN would allow the introduction of new tools and processes that would lessen the negative effect of data growth and distributed storage structures.
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