Compellent assists Tourvest

Tourism group Tourvest has announced that it has implemented Compellent, a highly scalable enterprise-class Storage Area Network (SAN) that lowers storage costs, reduces administration time, improves utilisation, automates replication and speeds up data recovery.

Ingran Africa, a local storage specialist and distributor of Compellent Technologies, implemented this solution.

Although Tourvest was running out of space on its previous SAN, the dilemma they faced was that the SAN was end-of-life which meant there were no upgrades available. The SAN was using a mixture of SATA and Fibre drives.

Tourvest Senior Network Analyst Louis De Bruyn says they needed more space as the company expanded and their previous solution was not able to cope and upgrading was not an option. We evaluated a number of different options to provide flexible storage with robust recovery capabilities and ultimately selected a Fluid Data architecture from Compellent.‚

Ingran managing director Andre Moller says after allocating all of the storage on the legacy SAN, the only way to gain access to unused capacity was to destroy over-allocated volumes, re-create them, and then restore the data.

The re-allocation process would be so cumbersome and even worse, if they wanted to increase their storage, they were going to have to essentially replace the whole solution. This forklift upgrade process would be never-ending, Tourvest would have to continue replacing the solution as their demands for the storage system increased over time, he explains.

Once Compellent became operational, Tourvest immediately had ample space and speed. Tourvest was able to consolidate and integrate a lot of systems onto Compellent, meaning less servers and thus less licensing fees.

De Bruyn says the complete installation took two days. We immediately noticed an improvement in speed, but apart from that, we now have a solution that is fully redundant, fully upgradeable, regardless of what new technology may become available. We are now able to make use of services such as boot from SAN which was unavailable with the previous solution.‚

We now have full control over our SAN with a user friendly, Web-based graphic user interface. Our system is also monitored 24 hours per day by Compellent in the United States. More importantly, Ingran has been extremely helpful and professional. Whenever we needed their help, they were always available and only a phone call away, night or day, he says.

Although hands on training was provided,whenever problems arise, to this date, Ingran pull out all the stops to help solve the problems, he concluded.