OGN takes highly virtualized data centre into the next gear, combining block level flash with the power of auto-tiering and a virtualized
metro-cluster.
READING, UK
– Sept 17, 2015 –DataCore Software, a leader in Software-Defined Storage, have announced that
Offshore Group Newcastle Limited (OGN) in Tyneside has optimized their virtualized estate further using the power and flex of DataCore’s SANsymphony-V™
solution. The company provides engineering, procurement and construction services to the offshore oil & gas and renewable energy industries. Working at
the forefront of innovation and engineering excellence, the company’s modern data centres are equally well equipped, future-proofed and consolidated. Fully
virtualized and filled with VMware virtual hosts sharing fibre channel storage, the IT Department deliver and support multiple intensive applications from
offshore planning to business critical services such as SQL and ERP. However, as the business has blossomed with prestigious contract wins and a switch to
24 hour operations, so the pressure upon IT has mounted. Expansion of the company’s SAP Enterprise Resource Planning platform alongside Microsoft Exchange,
SQL databases and file servers was squeezing the storage infrastructure to such an extent that bottlenecks were becoming more commonplace.
“The problem we saw at OGN manifested entirely from ongoing successful business growth. The modern, highly virtualised VMware ESX environment that had
been executed meticulously a few years back had almost trebled in size, and storage could no longer cope with the demands the business placed on
burgeoning critical applications.” Simon Birbeck, Executive Technology Consultant, Waterstons.
Waterston’s Solution: Turbo-Charge the Estate & Unleash the Power of DataCore.
OGN were already running metro-cluster synchronously mirrored storage, with the stretch cluster running on a pair of DataCore SANsymphony-V nodes housed on
Dell T620 commodity servers and MD1220 SAS-attached storage, with a fully redundant 8Gbps Brocade fibre channel fabric across the iconic site. This
infrastructure provided the business with continuous availability even during periods of data centre maintenance, with a no single point of failure design.
To deal with the unprecedented growth of the environment, a straightforward turbo charge of the Head Office virtual estate was implemented with the
relatively low cost introduction of a new storage tier; a Micron P420m PCI-e flash card. The resultant additional 1400GB of low latency storage harnessed
DataCore’s Auto Tiering feature to automatically maintain the production working data set across all key virtual machines on flash. Auto Tiering adapts
continuously to changes – making sure the right data is held in the right place at the right time.
One Million IOPs Achieved Overnight:
After install, all eyes turned to see how the extra flash IOPs (Input/Output Operations per Second – the measurement of storage performance) would perform
in handling line of business applications in the turbo charged environment. Approaching a million IOPs, the Team realized they had executed one of the
fastest infrastructure performance improvement projects with little outlay, and infrastructure overhead and no disruption to operations.
Jonathan Taylor, OGN’s Corporate Head of IT observes:-
“By utilizing ‘off-the-shelf’ components in a creative solution, Waterstons were able to dramatically increase performance of our systems across the
board. Crucially, the performance uplift was sufficient to enable us to defer adoption of costly ‘in memory’ ERP appliances, at least until that
technology becomes suitably mature.”
Simon Birbeck, Executive Technology Consultant, Waterston’s concluded:- “
The IOP count showed even greater performance improvements than we had initially envisaged. And these weren’t just benchmark figures. Six months down
the line, OGN continues to enjoy lightning fast storage response for their line of business applications which helps to give them a competitive edge.”
About Waterstons:
Waterstons is a business and IT consultancy with offices in Durham and London. They work with a variety of clients and industries across the UK providing
creative technology based solutions to improve business performance and increase competitive advantage. Established in 1994, Waterstons has developed and
grown on the basis of their core principles of trust, integrity and outstanding customer service. Visit www.waterstons.com
About DataCore
DataCore is the leading provider of Software-Defined Storage and
Adaptive, Parallel I/O Software
– harnessing today’s powerful and cost-efficient server platforms to solve the IT industry’s biggest storage problem, the I/O bottleneck. The company’s
comprehensive and flexible storage virtualization and hyper-converged virtual SAN solutions free users from the pain of
labor-intensive storage management and provide customers true independence from storage solution vendors that cannot offer a hardware agnostic
architecture. DataCore’s Software-Defined Storage platforms revolutionize storage infrastructure and serve as the cornerstone of the next-generation,
software-defined data center – delivering greater value, performance, availability, and simplicity. Visit https://www.datacore.com or call (877) 780-5111 for more information.
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DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANsymphony are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service
names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may
be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTACT
For media & PR inquiries:
Sharon Munday
KPR Global
smunday@kprglobal.com
0778 7566382
Editor’s Notes:
OGN Group is a main contractor to the oil & gas and renewable energy sectors providing EPC contracting services. The OGN Group Hadrian Yard facility,
based in Tyneside, extends to 323,752m2 (32 hectares) with an assembly and erection area of 104,000m2. The facility has a 1,000m quay
wall with reinforced load-out quays capable of loading out up to 13,000 tonnes.