STORAGE

Government improves operations while reducing datacenter cost with IBM SAN Volume Controller: IBM has announced that the Government of Nova Scotia, has implemented a virtualized storage infrastructure which is enabling them to reduce maintenance costs while improving the availability of critical information and creating a more manageable data center for future data growth. The Government of Nova Scotia manages the business affairs for the province of Nova Scotia which is located on Canada’s southeast coast. Nova Scotia has the highest population of the Atlantic provinces, serving nearly a million people. The Government’s Corporation IT Operations (CITO) manages government data, technology and telecommunications services. Each year the data they receive, ranging from the health data to land deeds and vehicle records, increases by 100 percent. Anticipating such growth annually, the Government needed an IT solution not only to meet this demand but one that was flexible while being quick and easy to deploy. Based on their experiences with server virtualization, the Province of Nova Scotia turned to a virtualized storage environment in 2007, based on IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, IBM System Storage DS4800 disk storage, IBM System Storage Productivity Center and Tivoli Storage Manager software. By 2008, the Government of Nova Scotia expanded its infrastructure with four additional DS3400 systems. Most recently, the Government implemented thin provisioning and mirroring for more efficient use of storage. The Government also has a server environment which includes IBM System x and BladeCenter as well as IBM POWER Systems p570. “We need to be able to manage our data while systems are up and running. The people of Nova Scotia depend on the ability to access the records we store 24/7 so downtime isn’t an option,” said Kevin Tillman, Manager of Datacentre Services, the Government of Nova Scotia. “IBM SAN Volume Controller provides exactly what we need -- higher performance and increased scalability with no downtime. Not only have we reduced our management costs while managing more and more data, we know we have the flexibility we need as our storage needs continue to grow.” IBM’s storage virtualization is an important part of the information infrastructure strategy - delivering the availability, security, retention and compliance requirements that clients seek. This strategy maps directly to IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center model, which helps clients improve IT efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth. IBM’s storage virtualization solution is a key tool in allowing customers to improve the cost efficiency of their data centers: SVC is designed to migrate data from older to newer disk systems without disruption to applications, so it helps customer start that migration immediately and disconnect their older, less efficient storage much more quickly; SVC is designed to simplify implementation of a tiered storage infrastructure and improve performance of lower tier storage, moving data without disruption – which makes it easy to match data types with the right storage, and to move data when requirements change. Together, these abilities of SVC make it easy to blend different types of storage for a lower overall energy footprint; and SVC helps increase the utilization of storage and reduce requirements for additional storage in the future. SVC is designed to pool storage volumes from IBM and non-IBM storage systems into a single reservoir of capacity for centralized management, helping to improve storage utilization and reduce storage growth rates. This ability can reduce the total amount of storage hardware required, which helps reduce the energy usage of the storage configuration. Storage Virtualization in Action is an ongoing IBM Storage campaign to showcase some of the cross-industry examples of how customers are using IBM’s storage virtualization solution in real-world environments.