Paul Leask, IT Manager at HTA recalls, “I joined the HTA team in December 2009 and was immediately struck by the pace and workload of the design teams who were amidst several prestigious designs, including the Olympic Way development which had recently received planning consent. The storage infrastructure was showing reliability issues and users were complaining about the time taken to open CAD designs which often linked to large reference files, performance was becoming a big concern.” It was clear to Paul that the server infrastructure was a prime candidate for virtualization and the SAN was in need of modernization. The new storage infrastructure would need full support for the latest virtualization platforms and deliver the much needed leap in performance to ensure the design teams could work to their maximum efficiency.

Establishing a high-performance virtualized storage infrastructure

Paul enlisted the help of Krome Technologies who he had worked with in previous roles within the media industry. Krome Technologies are a storage and virtualization specialist who offer vendor independent advice on the latest technology solutions and advancements.

HTA’s design team rely heavily on several core design tools which include Autodesk® Revit® Structure Suite, Bentley® MicroStation V8i and the Adobe Creative Suite®, and typically projects produce very large design and reference files which must be accessed by HTA’s 100+ designers across the corporate network.

Working in conjunction with Krome Technologies, Paul evaluated storage solutions from several leading vendors with price/performance and ease of scalability being key criteria. The Dot Hill AssuredSAN series of networked RAID array’s proved to easily meet the price/performance requirement and excelled in the ease of scalability whereas many competitive products required additional licensing fees to expand storage capacity beyond the initial RAID chassis. Paul decided to base the new storage infrastructure on iSCSI technology for simplicity and to standardize on Ethernet as the transport within HTA’s data centre. The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 2332 iSCSI RAID array was chosen with 17TB of live production data running on SAS drives for performance and reliability.

Building a new virtual server & storage environment with high availability

A new VMware® based infrastructure was developed with support from Krome Technologies, during this redesign 12 of the physical legacy servers were consolidated down to VMware ESX hosts running on HP DL series servers. The Kerio based mail system was upgraded to Exchange 2010 running within the VMWare 4.1 estate and the aging bank of main data servers were migrated into the new solution using P2V Services. Paul also implemented intelligent backup and replication software from Veeam which allows application based snap-shots to be taken from the SAN.

As part of his data centre rebuild Paul was able to re-purpose his legacy HP MSA 1000 based SAN as a secondary storage tier which is used as a backup-to-disk target for the VMware hosts using Veeam and then archived to tape using Symantec Backup Exec. Paul explains, “Building design can be a very litigious industry so it is vital that we archive completed projects which may be called upon for legal purposes in the future, for that reason I have worked closely with Krome to eliminate single points of failure in our design and we are now developing our disaster recovery policies further.”

Data integrity and availability are also vital to HTA and the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 2332 system has proved impeccable in this regard, “The Dot Hill 2332 has been running for over 1 year now with zero downtime. I’ve not experienced such great reliability in a storage product in my 20+ years in the IT industry!” exclaimed Paul. “ We did in fact have to add a new drive to the RAID system but this took place while the system was running our live production environment, it took the system some time to incorporate the new drive and I was quite sceptical as to the outcome, but in the end the new drive was fully integrated into the RAID set and we didn’t miss a beat. We didn’t even notice any loss in performance during this time either” added Paul.

The Dot Hill AssuredSAN platform provides a scalable foundation for the virtual server estate at HTA with the ability to scale in both capacity and RAID performance with complete re-use of their initial investment. The full certification of all Dot Hill AssuredSAN arrays with VMware® ESX and vSphere provides peace of mind when deploying a consolidated virtual storage infrastructure and this combination works seamlessly with the Veeam backup environment.

Delivering the performance needed to ensure design productivity

Rapid network access to CAD design files is crucial for the design teams at HTA. The move to an iSCSI based SAN with the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 2332 delivered a major improvement in design productivity, Paul explains: “We were in a situation with our outgoing SAN whereby particularly large reference files were taking up to 10 minutes to open across the network, with the move to the Dot Hill platform we brought that down to just 2 seconds, I have certainly received good feedback regarding the performance of our network from many of the staff since we implemented the new design”.

Making way for improved disaster recovery with remote replication

The next steps for HTA include provision for off site data replication and for this they are planning to deploy further Dot Hill AssuredSAN arrays with SATA drives to provide greater capacity, “Most CAD files are upwards of 100MB and we also find we have about 30% duplication, so replication with de-duplication are high on our priority list” states Paul. “We are extremely pleased with the services provided by Krome and as for the Dot Hill platform, since the initial installation and configuration I haven’t attended to the platform whatsoever, it just works.”

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