SASOL Synthetic Fuels has taken the first step in centralizing of server disk storage in a Storage Area Network by installing a CLARiiON Fibre Channel storage system from Data General.
Johan la Grange, Information Manager for SSF, said that the CLARiiON product was decided upon due to the fact that SSF investigations have shown that CLARiiON to be the market leader in full fibre solutions. "We did a complete study of the various products available and found the CLARiiON solution to be the correct fit for our needs." The CLARiiON FC5700 with an upgrade path to 120 x 36Gig Fibre Channel drives has been installed.
La Grange continued that SSF is currently formulating a 3 to 5 year IT strategy which includes the establishing of DRP sites to make provision for a very high level of data availability. "We will roll out the further SAN technology from CLARiiON as this is released and tested by SSF. The advantages that we see in migrating our storage away from the servers to a Storage Area Network are numerous including the advantages in managing the systems, upgrading or replacement of server technology as well as removing the backup load from our network."
The SAN project will be rolled out by PQChem, the outsource partner of SASOL. SAN technology is based on the establishing of storage pools which are shared by various servers.
Through their CLARiiON Advanced Storage Division, Data General was the first major vendor to ship end-to-end Fibre Channel disk arrays, the foundation for the deployment of SAN`s. Having shipped more that 90 000 disk arrays and over 6.5 petabytes of RAID-protected storage, CLARiiON is recognized as the world`s leading supplier of storage systems in the Unix and NT markets. Data General and EMC has recently announced their merger which has just been completed, making the joint company under the EMC name, the largest independent supplier of Enterprise Storage Systems in the word.
The CLARiiON products will be supplied by CSS Distributors (Pty) Ltd, a CLARiiON distributor.
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