DataCore Software, a leading provider of storage virtualization, has implemented a cost-effective, reliable and robust SAN solution at Truck-Lite Europe that simplifies storage administration and maximizes storage and server utilization using DataCore and Virtual Iron. Truck-Lite is now benefiting from a solution that provides a flexible virtualisation infrastructure that automates storage provisioning and protects their data from disasters.
Truck-Lite Europe is part of the largest commercial vehicle lighting company in the world with a customer base that includes Volvo, Daimler Chrysler, Scania, Ford, GM and JCB.
From its Harlow base, Truck-Lite Europe provides IT services to over 650 internal customers across two sites. Formerly known as Flexible Lamps and acquired by Truck-Lite Co. Inc. late in 2006, the merged organization is a multi-billion British pound operation with several thousand employees. Early in 2007 it was decided that the former Flexible Lamps' data center would become the European data center for Truck-Lite. So faced with growing data volumes from the merged organizations and the desire to robustly protect business critical data in the wake of lessons learned from the Buncefield Oil disaster, the team set out to find an effective, reliable storage utilization and Disaster Recovery solution that cost-effectively alleviated the pain of running Direct Attached Storage in a mixed Windows/Sun environment.
Mark Aylwin, IT support team leader, Truck-Lite Europe noted: "Like so many other manufacturers in the UK, we were forced to catapult Disaster Recovery to the top of the priority list in the wake of the Buncefield Oil inferno last year, forcing us to fully explore 'what-if worse-case' scenarios.
To meet their objectives, New Datum implemented a combination of Virtual Iron as the virtual server platform with two DataCore SANmelody 2.0 Dell Windows 2003 servers, providing synchronous mirroring and auto failover/auto recovery for path and data. The Disaster Recovery solution would provide high availability for Truck-Lite's business systems, such as their critical ERP system and the Virtual Iron server applications.
The resultant solution allowed Truck-Lite to automatically manage capacity provisioning and, because of the way SANmelody provides capacity upon demand from a central storage pool (thin provisioning), Aylwin and his team have been able to immediately release and re-utilize previously idle server storage space, in effect, handing back valuable storage capacity.