SANmelody at the Co-Op Jersey is a Fairtrade for High Availability.

DataCore has announced that together with DataCore’s trained and accredited partner, VirtualizeIT, they have installed SANmelody™ as the storage area network (SAN) virtual infrastructure at Co-Op Jersey’s office and branch network. The Co-Op is one of the UKs largest retailers with over 2,500 recently refurbished food stores and supermarkets around the UK and in the Channel Islands.

“In a constantly trading retail business such as ours, availability of store and office data is paramount.” stated Don Le Clercq, IT Manager, Co-Op Jersey. Downtime for maintenance and provisioning new servers is not acceptable. To enable this, we have used a combination of two IBM servers along with DataCore’s SANmelody to provide a synchronously mirrored high availability architecture.”

The Co-Op moved from direct attached storage to virtualised storage 18 months after the retail giant adopted two physical servers running VMware’s ESX and now hosts 15 virtual servers running critical applications protected by SANmelody.

The Co-Op connected the two storage servers over their WAN where all disk write I/Os are replicated instantly – providing total redundancy. In this configuration an entire storage server can fail without impact on the SAN or ESX hosts.

“Co-Op Jersey have managed to achieve easier management and shared provisioning of storage with limited server room space and without incurring heavy set up costs.” commented Keith Joseph, Regional Manager, DataCore Software.