EMC revitalises storage at Discovery Health

EMC recently played a large role in the reorganisation of Discovery Health`s storage infrastructure, implementing a fully comprehensive EMC storage solution.

Patrice Bouic, chief technology officer at Discovery Health, contacted EMC to build a robust solution suitable for the intended growth of Discovery Health due to excessive storage failures of the previous non-EMC equipment at the time.

The first installation was a Symmetrix 3430 with 800GB space. Over the past four years the infrastructure has grown and changed to meet the demands of the Discovery business that depends on the availability of information at all times. Through upgrades and further installations Discovery Health`s storage infrastructure has grown to over 140TB of storage space. It now incorporates a DMX3000 solution with storage on demand facilities that can handle an additional 42TB of growth.

Discovery`s storage requirements are varied, says Gerhard Van der Merwe the EMC district manager. The company needed 24/7 online operability, the elimination of its current backup window, rapid disaster recovery (DR) solutions and centralised data management and disk administration.

"As a complete solution, the EMC Enterprise Storage technologies, solved all these challenges and created a common way to share, manage and protect Discovery Health`s information," he says.

"EMC`s Enterprise Storage ensures that Discovery`s marketing, operations and customer services are not affected operationally in the event of a failure. This is due to the resilience and redundancy built into the storage infrastructure," says Van der Merwe.

The solution involved the implementation of an information-centric architecture, which separates information from processing platforms. It also allows the company to transfer large amounts of data quickly and efficiently, using EMC Enterprise Software. According to Van der Merwe, this cuts transfer times and minimises the cost of additional network capacity.

"Consolidation was key, he adds, as Discovery was conducting nightly replications to provide availability of information across the organisation. In addition to this, the ability to manage the replication, backups and storage management became critical to ensure availability and performance across the Discovery infrastructure.

"Speed of backups was also an issue, with our longest backup running at 15 hours a day," says Bouic. "We required effective backup platforms, offsite storage and a manageable backup window."

He says EMC TimeFinder, and EMC SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) have provided an enterprise-wide solution for remote replication of data, enabling rapid recovery at the secondary site. "If the primary site becomes inoperable, SRDF, an online, host-independent, mirrored data storage solution, enables rapid manual failover to Discovery`s secondary site, allowing critical data to be available to the business operation in under an hour."

"The EMC Data Manager (EDM) solution, implemented at Discovery, is a robust, centralised, consolidated and fully automated turnkey backup solution," he says. "It is fully integrated with TimeFinder and provides Discovery with fast and reliable backup and restores from and to BCVs (Business Control Volumes).

"Furthermore, the EDM not only backs up information stored on the Symmetrix, but also network attached workstations and servers, whether they`re Unix or NT," he says. "The EDM is a centralised, integrated, open systems backup and recovery solution, which fully automates Discovery`s backup scheduling, monitoring and reporting."

EMC also installed a Centera to handle Discovery`s archiving needs. This, says Van der Merwe, is the first step towards information lifecycle management (ILM) at Discovery Health. "The system automatically replicates required data between two Centera`s ensuring availability and eliminating the need to backup archived information," he says. "Furthermore, with capabilities of growth up to 180TB of storage, of which Discovery uses 9TB at present, they have no archiving capacity concerns."

Discovery moved from a two- to a three-site storage environment a few months ago. "With EMC`s assistance, the transition was made over eight weekends and our system ran smoothly during the period of reorganisation," says Bouic. "We now have full business continuity and DR functionality within the storage infrastructure and our systems are not impacted by any of our backups."

He adds that the partnership with EMC has been gratifying to date. "All our boxes are monitored by EMC 24 hours a day," he says. "Failures are resolved at an operational level without us being aware of it."

According to Van der Merwe, the implementation was built entirely around Discovery`s requirements, with a strong emphasis on data replication, backup/restore and DR issues. The total solution was comprehensive, easy to implement and manage and represents a total business continuance solution.

"EMC provided Discovery with a flexible, scalable, easier-to-manage solution incorporating high levels of performance and capacity that address its IT challenges," he concludes. "We comprehensively addressed the company`s needs for better information management, information protection and information sharing."