TheMultiple
Sclerosis Societyhas bucked the trend to outsource its
back-up data storage by bringing it in-house, expecting to save at
least £40,000 a year and improve system availability.
The society previously used a hosting service for its
distributed back-up IT operations in England, Wales, Scotland and
Northern Ireland. However, consolidation means that the number of
users it supports has jumped from 200 to 1,000 users.
This has raised the risk of downtime, an issue highlighted when
the hosted service went down for a week, said Andrew Young,
technical services manager for the MS Society. This was a chaotic
time as people resorted to services such as Hotmail and instant
messaging to communicate, but without ready records of previous
information exchanges, he said.
Looking to take its storage processes in-house, the society
chose iSCSI
EqualLogic
arrays from Dell, believing they would be easier and more
cost-effective than fibre channel or direct connect arrays to
deploy and maintain.
Overseas reports suggest that iSCSI installations come in at
about half of the price of fibre channel, but Young said the
society would also save £40,000 a year compared with the hosted
option. Young said the previous fibre channel hosted service had
cost £150,000 to set up, plus £18,000 a year in support.
While improving the back-up was the society's initial aim, the
system worked so well that it has moved its life data on to four
iSCSI arrays, with two for the back-up site that are refreshed
twice a day.
The storage area network, now around two terabytes, supports 35
physical and virtual servers running VMware. Main applications
include Exchange, the Raisers Edge database management system for
non-profits, Dynamics accounting and the Office suite on
desktops.
The society is also using Dell's advanced management
capabilities such as load balancing, snapshotting and thin
provisioning.
With the hardware problems under control, Young now faces a
training issue. Most of the society's workers are volunteers, he
said, which means that their IT skills range from zero to
sophisticated.
As a result, he is now looking to outsource first and second
line helpdesk support to ensure that as the society grows, everyone
gets the same level of service.