Pental upgrades storage for improved disaster recovery

Australian soap manufacturer Pental was struggling with an aging storage area network (SAN) that had the potential to cause serious backup issues, until it implemented new infrastructure.

Pental IT manager Mark Bishop told Computerworld Australia that its HP MSA shared storage system and two legacy EMC storage units were not meeting its needs.

“We were always worried that backups weren’t successful, or if our data was easily recoverable if we needed it,” he said.

“If we lost our SAN, we wouldn’t be able to receive orders from Coles and Woolworths which would cause massive issues for our business. If we had a protracted outage it would have been a business disaster.”

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This prompted Bishop to start looking at other storage options. He spoke to a number of vendors before reading an article about Nimble Storage in the Wall Street Journal which said the company was a key player to watch in the storage market.

“I needed something that would give us performance benefits and put us in a position to accomplish the goals that I want to achieve down the track such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and moving to a more robust disaster recovery [DR] strategy,” Bishop said.

He decided to install Nimble’s CS220G series system. Since the implementation, the company has reduced eight rack units down to three, achieved a 51 per cent saving in disk usage through compression and a 2.7 terabyte disk saving using thin provisioning.

“Our storage array doesn’t require daily human intervention plus it gives us better performance and stable environment,” Bishop said. “These factors allow us to feel secure with our data and means I can focus on projects that can make positive changes for the business.”

There are now plans to install a second Nimble Storage unit in Shepparton, Victoria during 2014 for DR purposes.

“We are also hoping to start trialling VDI next financial year with a pilot in Shepparton. Being able to do a pilot there will be great because we have a large amount of manufacturing and warehouse terminals that are running on old PCs,” he said.

Bishop plans to undertake the VDI trial with 20 manufacturing staff members before widening it to include laboratory technicians.

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