Peabody has consolidated its data storage onto a new storage and business continuity infrastructure designed and installed by Fordway Solutions. Automated data progression, combined with multiple tiers of storage, ensures that data is instantly allocated to the appropriate level of storage, eliminating the need for detailed progression planning and freeing Peabody’s IT team to focus on other activities. As part of the new infrastructure, the data recovery time for key systems has been reduced from one day to around 15 minutes.
Fordway began the project in September 2008, proposing a Compellent-based storage area network (SAN) solution to provide both business continuity and handle a significant increase in Peabody’s data storage requirements. Fordway’s installation of the SAN infrastructure was completed by May 2009.
The new infrastructure comprises two SANs, a primary one at Peabody’s headquarters and another in its office at Kings Cross. The primary site has a fully-redundant dual controller, both fibre and SATA disks and a fibre channel switch, with an iSCSI switch as failover. The secondary site has a single controller and SATA disks, enabling it to handle the same amount of data using lower cost storage.
Having taken Fordway two weeks to install the new infrastructure, Peabody’s IT team is now migrating its production systems onto the SAN one at a time, with support available from Fordway as required. As systems are migrated, they are automatically replicated onto the back-up SAN, enabling Peabody to restore systems much faster if there is any loss of service at its main site.
John Welch, head of IT, Peabody, said, “We knew we had to increase our storage capacity and we wanted a comprehensive, robust and easily-managed solution which would replicate our data and remove our reliance on tapes for recovery. We were very impressed with the speed of the installation, and we had the flexibility to carry out the migration ourselves while Fordway was on hand with support if we needed it.”
