"You’re Hired!" – For Job of Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery and Storage Management, Leading Recruitment Firm Chandler Macleod Selects DataCore Virtualization
Business Wire, Nov 28, 2007
Firm Hires DataCore Storage Virtualization SAN Solution to Complement and Protect Citrix and VMware Environment for Its 70 Offices Across Australia and New Zealand
SYDNEY, Australia — DataCore Software, the leading provider of hardware independent, storage virtualization SAN solutions, today announced that leading Australasia Human Resources (HR) outsourcing and recruitment firm Chandler Macleod has implemented a software-based storage virtualization strategy with DataCore[TM] SANmelody[TM] software in a high availability configuration. This achieves Chandler Macleod’s business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) objectives and provides the firm with the additional benefits of DataCore’s thin provisioning, which dramatically improves utilisation and snapshots to simplify and accelerate backups. Installed on off-the-shelf HP servers, this hardware independent, storage solution is truly portable to any standard server that may replace these servers, assuring Chandler Macleod of many years of return on its DataCore investment.
“When we first heard about the solution, we were understandably skeptical – it just sounded too good to be true,” said John Walker, IT Programme Manager, Chandler Macleod. “But we did the due diligence and even spoke to some other customers using it, and everything came back positive. The installation went smoothly and we spent a weekend trying to break it, but it stood up to the hype. Our existing SAN had a limitation of 32 LUNs. By introducing SANmelody[TM] into our storage infrastructure, we are now able to separate physical storage LUNs and logical LUNs and break that barrier.”
Founded in 1959, Chandler Macleod is one of Australasia’s largest and most diverse HR outsourcing and recruitment companies focusing on the provision of outstanding assessment, selection, recruitment and retention solutions across the blue-collar, office support, health, graduate, technical, IT, professional and executive sectors. Chandler Macleod operates a network of 70 offices across Australia and New Zealand and employs 800 branch and head office staff, 2,000 permanent field staff and 13,000 on hired employees.
With a production environment of Fibre Channel, a preference for a disaster recovery (DR) site of iSCSI, and a mixture of physical, VMware and Citrix servers, Chandler Macleod required a storage solution with tremendous flexibility. It had to be cost-effective, yet meet their performance requirements, and allow a full implementation of block level replication in order to meet their DR objectives. In addition, Chandler MacLeod wanted to do all of this without sacrificing the investment they already made into their existing shared storage array and SAN infrastructure.
“Chandler Macleod had selected all the right pieces, they just needed something to bond it all together,” commented David Bull, Technical Sales Director, DataCore Software. “DataCore puts the intelligence layer in the network where it is free from the constraints of hardware and provides future-proofing since the software is portable and upgradeable.”
The DataCore solution allowed Chandler Macleod to extend their investment in the existing storage by adding the features and manageability they required, such as thin provisioning and replication. As an added benefit, the storage became more stable and performance increased. Low cost disks were added, which allowed for a tiered environment – further saving costs.
“We now have a storage solution that is as robust and flexible as the servers – including the virtual ones – that it serves,” said Walker. “We did not have to invest heavily in storage hardware for future growth since we can add what we need, when we need it – despite which vendor we purchase it from. And when it does come time to refresh hardware, our storage practice will remain intact.”
Technical Architecture Solutions (TAS), a leading services provider to the Australian/Asian enterprise and solution partner for DataCore, was engaged by Chandler Macleod to re-engineer and deliver the consolidated virtual storage infrastructure. The primer to any deployment is via thorough planning and design to realise enhanced productivity and efficiency benefits. TAS provided the technical capability and implementation skills to deliver an on budget engagement, with minimal to no disruption.
“Downtime is unacceptable for Chandler Macleod’s 24/7 operation,” stated Tony Wilkinson, Managing Director, TAS
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