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Press Release - 14 June 2011
Duplo Turns to Coraid Ethernet Storage for High Performance Hyper-V Virtualisation
Finishing and Printing Giant Skips Legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI, Moves to Ethernet SAN
London, UK — Coraid Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet SAN solutions with more than 1,400 customers worldwide, today announced that Duplo International has deployed Coraid EtherDrive technology to build a high-performance, low-cost and easy-to-use shared storage solution for a Microsoft Hyper-V environment. The result is an Ethernet-based, enterprise-level SAN that out-performs any Fibre Channel and iSCSI alternatives, at a fraction of the cost.
Selling in 108 countries worldwide Duplo International provides finishing and printing equipment to all types of print operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Until Q1 2011 its IT infrastructure included individual physical servers with internal direct attached storage (DAS). However the utilisation of these servers was only reaching 10%-15% indicating an opportunity to reclaim capital expense and to reduce power and cooling costs. As a result the IT department decided to virtualise the servers in order to drive up utilisation and streamline the infrastructure. On the storage side this change meant that Duplo needed a technology that would integrate with the new Microsoft Hyper-V platform while being easy to manage and scale.
“We knew that server virtualisation would help us reduce our spend. However it would require a shared storage environment and our concern was that this would be so expensive that it would negate our server consolidation savings,” said Glyn Nutting, Financial Director at Duplo International.
Duplo turned to Axis First, a UK-based provider of IT solutions and Coraid Gold Partner, to help design the shared storage architecture. Upon investigation, both parties agreed that a Fibre Channel-based infrastructure would be too expensive and complex, but Duplo was not prepared to sacrifice performance by deploying iSCSI. Coraid’s Ethernet SAN technology leverages ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) to provide a high-performance, scalable architecture built with off-the-shelf, affordable hardware; Axis First therefore recommended a no-single-point-of-failure architecture centred around two of Coraid’s EtherDrive® SRX280016-disk high-performance Ethernet SAN arrays and two VSX2500 SAN virtualisation appliances and connected these to the customer’s Hyper-v R2 infrastructure running over 1 GB Ethernet network. Each Hyper-V server featured two HBAs connected to redundant Ethernet switches which were in turn connected to the arrays and the appliances. In addition, the data was mirrored between the two SRX2800 systems to provide maximum data protection. This design ensured that the failure of any one component would not result in disruption to the service.
“With the Duplo team we tested every aspect of the Coraid system; we even pulled power cables, but everything continued to work perfectly,” said Nick Dixon, Technologies Sales Director, at Axis First. “The customer had a very clear and demanding brief for us and thanks to Coraid we ticked all the boxes.”
Further proof of the power of a no-single-point-of-failure design came as Duplo was migrating its Exchange mailbox data to the new arrays. When a switch configuration issue required one VSX and one SRX system to be taken briefly offline, the data mirror kicked in without any disruption to the migration.
Dixon continues, “We initially looked at Coraid because of the low TCO but we were then blown away by the performance and the simplicity. We have been able to deploy enterprise-class features with a midrange budget; the Coraid solution came at less than half the cost of a similar-performance Fibre Channel environment.”
“By leveraging Ethernet as a storage protocol we eliminate the need for costly and time-consuming training for our end users,” said Marcos Burnett, EMEA Sales Director, at Coraid. “Fibre Channel is fast but costly, iSCSI is affordable but slow; Ethernet SAN eliminates that trade off, offering the best performance and the lowest cost of ownership. What’s not to like?”