Nottingham Building Society boosts storage and saves energy with Nexsan deployment

Nottingham Building Society has late an ageing IBM storage array and upgraded to Nexsan storage area network (SAN) hardware with around 20 times a capacity.

The pierce has authorised it to giveaway adult many staff hours formerly dedicated to troubleshooting storage and horde failures, with storage that occupies half a shelve space and uses reduction power.

The building multitude has around 700 staff in 67 branches and mostly runs a VMware environment.

The existent IBM DS storage with 3.2TB of ability was used for record share operations, yet was scarcely 6 years aged and had reached end-of-life, pronounced distributed record height manager Phillip Crocker.

“It wasn’t a many arguable performer towards a end. We would see VMs [virtual machines] unexpected stall and we wouldn’t know why. We indispensable shot of it before it blew up,” he said.

“We got it when we were most smaller, yet a multitude had doubled in staff and there wasn’t adequate ability to run what we needed,” he added.

The multitude evaluated a marketplace with a assistance of reseller Softcat and looked during Dell EMC and HPE storage hardware. Both were deserted on drift of cost.

“Dell EMC – for a VNX array – was somewhere nearby double what we eventually paid. Softcat didn’t even tell us what a HPE hardware cost,” pronounced Crocker.

Crocker’s group eventually deployed a dual-controller Nexsan E18P with 21TB of spinning hoop serial-attached SCSI drive ability and 18Gbps Fibre Channel connectivity.

The pivotal benefit, pronounced Crocker, is that a multitude has gained a outrageous volume of ability with jet engine-like reliability.

“It’s discerning and reliable, and to fit all this in 2U is flattering damn good,” he said. “The categorical thing yet is assent of mind. We don’t have to be endangered about it like were previously, always disturbed about a out-of-hours pager going off.”

Did Crocker cruise a need for any peep storage?

“We looked during peep yet motionless we didn’t need it. We’re regulating Nexsan for a lot of record shares, so a need for peep opening and IOPS [input/output operations per second] isn’t there. We’re not performance-driven, yet will demeanour during it again in a integrate of years.”