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ARMONK, NY, Febuary 13, 2008 —IBM today announced that Georgia's Gwinnett County is using a virtualized information infrastructure that is enabling them to reduce overall storage costs, respond quicker to increased storage needs, and dramatically improve the speed of data migration processes by up to four times.
Gwinnett County stores critical tax information and government records on
their systems, which have recently become accessible to the public online.
Storage is needed 24 hours a day so negotiating outage windows with
internal users can be painful and with no visibility into scheduled
downtime, users outside the organization expect information to be available
on demand, as needed. With a continuous increase in traffic to the Web
site and new applications available online, it became crucial for Gwinnett
County to have a reliable information infrastructure that targeted zero
downtime, strong data protection, easy migration and that can operate
around the clock.
“Incorporating virtualization into our storage infrastructure was exactly
what we needed,” said Phillip Wilson, Gwinnett County contract IT
architect. “If someone needs more storage, I simply open the SAN VolumeController console and increase their storage allocation. Storage
management with the IBM SAN Volume Controller is a storage administrator's
dream come true.”
Knowing their needs had shifted towards a more flexible solution, Gwinnett
County turned to IBM and IBM Business Partner Cpak to provide a consistent
and dependable information infrastructure that is easily upgraded with no
disruption to applications. Gwinnett County implemented the IBM System
Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) as the keystone of their storage
virtualization environment, along with the IBM System Storage DS4800 and
DS4700 disk arrays as the backbone of their tiered storage infrastructure.
Both Intel architecture-based servers and IBM System p 570 and System p 690
servers, which host the county's SAP applications, were attached to the
virtualized information infrastructure.
IBM's storage virtualization solution is a key tool in allowing customers
to improve the energy efficiency of their data centers:
- SVC is designed to migrate data from older to newer disk systems
without disruption to applications, so it helps customer start that
migration immediately and disconnect their older, less efficient storage
much more quickly;
- SVC is designed to simplify implementation of a tiered storage
infrastructure and improve performance of lower tier storage, moving data
without disruption -- which makes it easy to match data types with the
right storage, and to move data when requirements change. Together, these
abilities of SVC make it easy to blend different types of storage for a
lower overall energy footprint; and
- SVC helps increase the utilization of storage and reduce requirements
for additional storage in the future. SVC is designed to pool storage
volumes from IBM and non-IBM storage systems into a single reservoir of
capacity for centralized management, helping to improve storage utilization
and reduce storage growth rates. This ability can reduce the total amount
of storage hardware required, which helps reduce the energy usage of the
storage configuration.
Storage Virtualization in Action is an ongoing IBM Storage campaign to
showcase some of the cross-industry examples of how customers are using
IBM's storage virtualization solution in real-world environments.
To read further details on the storage virtualization solution implemented
at Gwinnett County, visit ibm.com/storage/svc and click on
'Case Studies' to review the case study that has been developed.
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