Royal Horticultural Society Deploys Green SAN from Compellent and Saves a King's RansomMarch 26, 2008
Compellent Automates Tiered Storage and Thin Provisioning for 200,000 Images
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., March 26, 2008 – The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the UK's most influential gardening charity, now has a greener data storage infrastructure as well as lower storage-related capital and operating costs following the deployment of two energy-efficient storage area networks (SANs) from Compellent. The charity also benefits from a more robust and proactive disaster recovery platform for its library of over 200,000 high resolution horticultural images, with server recovery times reduced from 12 days to 24 hours.
The RHS requires its IT infrastructure, which includes 40 servers and 600 PCs, to be fully operational at all times so that members can gain entry to its gardens, new membership applications can be handled, transactions at the Society's shops can be processed and suppliers can be paid. The IT infrastructure, which was installed by Fordway, one of Compellent's UK channel partners, plays a key role in the successful organization and management of the RHS flower shows – including the Society's annual flagship events at Chelsea, Hampton Court Palace and Tatton Park.
Commenting on Compellent's technology, Phillip Gladwin, IT Security and Operations Manager, at the RHS, said: "It’s fast, effective and right at the cutting edge – and is incredibly easy to manage. It also offers us immediate and long term cost savings, while helping us do our bit for the environment."
The Society selected a 12 TB Compellent SAN featuring automated tiered storage and thin provisioning for its primary London data center comprising two controllers with 2.5 TB of high-performance Fibre Channel (FC) capacity and 9.5 TB of low-cost SATA capacity. A second Compellent SAN, located approximately a mile away, also had two controllers but the entire 12TB capacity was made up only with low-cost SATA drives. Initially, all images were loaded onto the high-speed FC drives on the primary SAN. As usage patterns emerged, the system automatically moved the least accessed images to the lower cost SATA drives, and then back up to the faster drives if they became more popular so that they could be accessed and downloaded more quickly. The entire solution saved the RHS a considerable amount of money and also contributed to a greener storage solution, as SATA drives require much less power than FC drives.
Going forward, the Society plans to connect around 30 of its servers to the SAN and move toward a virtual environment in order to ensure a more effective level of server utilization. The RHS will continue to pool all server and storage resources, so the Compellent story at the Royal Horticultural Society will continue to blossom for many years to come.
"By deploying a Compellent SAN, organizations are able to cut the short and longer term costs associated with data storage, while also reducing the carbon footprint of their IT assets," said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. "The RHS also benefited from our automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and continuous snapshot technologies, which strengthened its disaster recovery capabilities without the complexity and time taken by more traditional SAN infrastructures."
About Compellent
Compellent is a leading provider of enterprise-class network storage solutions that are highly scalable, feature-rich and designed to be easy to use and cost effective. Compellent Technologies' principal offices are located in Eden Prairie, Minn. For more information, please visit: http://www.compellent.com.
Contact Information:
Liem Nguyen
Compellent Technologies
952-294-2851
liem.nguyen@compellent.com
Patty Barry
Matter Communications
978-499-9250, x231
patty@matternow.com
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