LOGICALIS ENHANCES BIS STORAGE SERVICES

iSCSI based SAN solution from Logicalis provides BIS with cutting edge storage services

Customer profile

BIS Ltd. was founded in 1996 to supply tailored IT solutions to customers with multiple sites and main offices located in the City of London. It is an established supplier of high performance enterprise infrastructure solutions to major corporates across a wide variety of sectors including insurance, finance, legal and media business communities.

BIS had provided data storage and online back up solutions for three years on a reseller basis, packaging and hosting solutions from third party providers. Given the high client expectations it was critical for BIS to have a reliable, robust and secure IT infrastructure, capable of storing vast amounts of data.

However, as customer requirements over the last two years have changed and the need for more storage and data volumes increased, BIS' legacy environment could not handle the rising volume of work and was becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

Customer's business issues

BIS needed to refresh their storage environment and introduce a more resilient solution that would:

  • Centralise storage
  • Increase storage space
  • Improve manageability
  • Re-use existing infrastructure for low TCO
  • Create a base for new services

Customer's business objectives

BIS had a number of objectives it needed to address:

  • Manage rising volume of work
  • Maintain reputation for high levels of service for customers
  • Maintain premium brand experience
  • Continue to deliver cutting-edge services using the latest standards to guarantee the highest levels of service resilience and scalability

Initial customer set up

Limitations in the old infrastructure meant BIS was unable to offer an integrated managed online data back up solution to multiple customers. With a diverse and demanding client base, the company's biggest concern was the ability to manage multiple customer requirements, replacement of older storage applications and the implementation of new technology to improve resilience.

"The old infrastructure could not keep pace with customer demand or the sheer volume of data that needed to be stored in a resilient and fail safe environment," says Raj Bosamia, Head of Product Development, BIS Limited. "The nature of the implementations made it difficult to scale and manage, which was critical given the information we store and the type of clients we work with."

With the old infrastructure unable to keep pace with business demands, BIS took the strategic decision to move away from reselling third party components and devise its own solution. Scalability was critical to future-proof its investment and provide a foundation to roll out new solutions when they were required. BIS already had some elements in place, such as data centres and their own MPLS network running over dark fibre, but needed a SAN infrastructure for disaster recovery and increased resilience in the middleware.

The Logicalis solution

Logicalis visited the company and produced a comprehensive analysis of the current infrastructure in a series of technical workshops. By investing this time up front to understand what the company needed, Logicalis was able to produce a full evaluation of its storage needs.

Working closely with BIS, Logicalis implemented an iSCSI-based SAN over two sites. This consisted of Nexsan disk vaults at each location attached to SANRAD Vswitch 2000FC, linked by a gigabit Ethernet. These combine as an interoperable dual port iSCSI gateway with SANRAD StoragePro Management Services.

This provides a cost-effective iSCSI-based SAN with continuous access and effective storage management through IP connectivity and network volume management. It enables rapid data recovery in the event of a network problem and replicates the data on the file server for full fail over and disaster recovery.

These carefully selected and installed components ensured a smooth integration with BIS' existing disks and two back up servers. The architecture implemented gives BIS the flexibility to scale as needs dictate, as well as increasing infrastructure resilience and facilitating BIS with an efficient disaster recovery system. The entire solution, from initial analysis to going online, was delivered in six weeks.

Hardware:

  • SANRAD Series 2000 Fibre Channel V Switches
  • Nexsan Disk Vaults

Software: SANRAD StoragePro management

Services:

  • Design of solution
  • Installation
  • Consultancy
  • Project management

Ongoing Support: predefined SLA to deliver rapid and resolution

Customer benefits:

  • Cost-effective, scalable iSCSI SAN installation
  • Integration with existing infrastructure
  • Implementation of disk vaults for increased storage
  • High availability and fully redundant operation
  • Platform for future solutions
  • Project completed within short time frame and on budget

Why Logicalis?

A close working partnership has developed and together BIS and Logicalis are looking at a number of other projects.  BIS' Raj Bosamia says: "By working with Logicalis we have a platform that enables us to offer more solutions and we will work with it to take our products to the next level.  We are going to have multiple enhancements to the products we offer in terms of online back up, storage and replication."

Bosamia continues: "The solution has enabled us to go to market very cost-effectively to offer a service that the market wants and needs at a price they're willing to pay.  We already have many customers live, with more in the pipeline.  The key factor of BIS Backup, the solution that BIS runs on this architecture, is the manageability from a customer point of view – they want to maintain their own back up policies and schedules so they are in control of their data.  Because the solution utilises Vswitches we can add more storage very easily and without having to replace components or re-architect the entire infrastructure, giving BIS quick to market scalability to meet customer demand."

Key facts

Customer business issues:

  • Centralise storage
  • Increase storage space
  • Improve manageability
  • Re-use existing infrastructure for low TCO
  • Create a base for new services

The Logicalis solution:

  • Design of solution
  • Installation of all hardware and running applications
  • Project management
  • Smooth integration with BIS' existing disks and back up servers
  • Rapid data recovery

Benefits:

  • Cost-effective, scalable iSCSI SAN installation
  • Integration with existing infrastructure
  • Implementation of disk vaults for increased storage
  • High availability and fully redundant operation
  • Platform for future solutions
  • Project completed within short time frame and on budget

Partnerships:

  • Nexsan
  • SANRAD

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