Liberty SAN underpins operating agility

The Liberty Group has completed the implementation of a storage area network (SAN) that has helped the financial services group to ease administration, improve data access and availability, and reduce running costs in their its open systems. The group appointed Storage Solutions at MGX as its supplier and services partner for the project.

Graeme Hunter, capacity planning and strategy manager at Liberty Group, says the group kicked off a drive to consolidate and better manage its storage environment more than a year-and-a-half ago. At that time, Liberty had five storage disk arrays from multiple vendors attached to its Sun Solaris and OS/390 servers.

Over the past year-and-a-half, Liberty has migrated its Unix servers from direct-attached storage to the SAN in a phased approach, shifting six and a half terabytes of data onto two Hitachi Data Systems storage arrays connected in a SAN environment.

The financial services group opted for a SAN solution based on Brocade switches, VERITAS Volume Manager, VERITAS File System, and StorageTek 9840 tape drives in a StorageTek Powderhorn library, all supplied by Storage Solutions at MGX.

The SAN caters for some of the Liberty Group`s most business-critical Unix applications, including the COMPASS financial services application used in several of the group`s operating companies and the FileNet document imaging system.

Hunter says the most immediate benefit of the SAN is that it allows Liberty`s IT department to configure and connect disk storage to its servers without downtime. The SAN solution also allows Liberty to perform automated backup and data archiving without clogging up its local and campus area networks.

"VERITAS Volume Manager and the Brocade switches, together with the Hitachi 9960 storage arrays give us a great deal of flexibility in allocating and adding storage space to different servers. This has helped us to maximise our use of storage space, which translates into vast cost-savings," says Hunter.

The SAN implementation has also helped Liberty to create a resilient IT infrastructure that will facilitate a fast recovery of its business-critical Unix applications from a hardware failure or any other disaster at its primary data centre, says Hunter. Users will be able to access data mirrored at a remote site should the main data centre be unavailable.

"In addition, by mirroring data to a remote site, we have managed to move towards an enquiry environment that is available 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Our intermediaries and internal users can access a remote copy of the data when we are running batch work through the main system," says Hunter.

Nick Wonfor, VERITAS sales manager, comments: ``The VERITAS Volume Manager, an online storage management tool, is an integral part of the solution. The product removes the physical limitations of disk storage, so that Liberty can configure, share, and manage storage without interrupting data availability. It also helps the group to reduce both planned and unplanned storage downtime.

"VERITAS`s close relationship with server and storage vendors such as EMC, Sun, Hitachi and IBM, and with software vendors like Oracle, was one of the factors that weighed heavily in the software vendors` favour when Liberty was evaluating products for the SAN. The Liberty Group wanted a solution that would free it from lock-in with any single disk, tape or network fabric vendor."

Tom Borkett, account executive, Storage Solutions at MGX, says: "SAN solutions provide companies with economies of scale and operational efficiencies that were previously unavailable in the open systems world. SANs provide a great deal of flexibility to businesses by separating processor and storage requirements from each other, allowing extra storage to be added and allocated to servers as and when needed. This translates into quantifiable cost-savings and increased up-time."