A requirement from Africon, the Pretoria-based black empowered professional services consultancy, for higher availability of centrally stored data at greater speed across the entire organisation, has been met by the storage division of the JSE-listed Square One Solutions Group.
For Africon, which provides sustainable development and infrastructure solutions to public and private sector organisations, it was strategically important to achieve 24/7/365 data availability and to improve the speed of data retrieval and transmission across its enterprise network.
"The solution was achieved cost-effectively by adding a second V-Switch 3000 from international storage system specialist SANRAD," said Square One's National Practice Manager for Storage, Luca Ambrosi. "This has significantly increased uptime of the storage infrastructure and data availability while at the same time giving Africon twice the throughput. Now Africon staff have the confidence that comes from knowing that their data storage is always available because the system is fully redundant."
The data storage system at Africon comprises two 4TB SATA to FC (Arena RAID) enclosures installed and commissioned using SANRAD V-Switch equipment and technology, configured as hardware RAID5 with an online spare within each enclosure. Further redundancy was achieved by deploying RAID1 (mirroring) between the two enclosures, made possible by the use of the SANRAD StoragePro software and V-Switches. The hosts are connected to the two V-Switch 3000s via separate network segments (V LANS) on existing Cisco Gigabit Ethernet switches.
The complete solution was achieved at a cost of about R500 000 which Ambrosi said offered an exceptionally high price performance ratio compared to more conventional FC-based solutions. He added that the availability was such that an entire enclosure could fail and the data would still be online.
Africon IS manager Johann Putter said the price to capability ratio of an iSCSI IP-based SAN storage solution was a significant advantage and the system had proved effective and reliable.
"To further improve speed and availability, the addition of a second V-Switch was a logical, efficient and cost-competitive solution. The service agreement we have with Square One for ongoing support of the system is another aspect that gives us peace of mind and security."
Square One Solutions Group is a VAR for SANRAD equipment and technology in southern Africa.
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