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Ambassador Theatre Group Ltd
The long term aim, to improve the control and management of data, reduce the total cost of ownership of the desktop environment and increase the resilience, flexibility and scalability of the IT infrastructure.
The Ambassador Theatre Group is a 400 user organisation, spread across twenty six geographically dispersed locations throughout the UK and the US. The original IT design was based on a traditional distributed and dispersed network of servers and data, which were sited at appropriate sites close to main user groups. Core deliverables include an enterprise database application, Microsoft Office products and general data.
Challenges
As the organisation grew and demands on the IT systems increased, a number of challenges were identified. These included:
The ability for individual users to operate from multiple offices and/or external to the organisation, whilst maintaining a consistent environment and experience.
The cost, complexity and capacity of attempting to back up large amounts of dispersed data located at multiple sites by traditional methods.
The need to vastly improve system recovery sites, introduce structured business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
The cost, skill sets and resources required to support and maintain the core IT deliverables in a rapidly growing and very dynamic organisation.
The cost and capability to power, cool and physically house an ever increasing IT infrastructure.
To accommodate a rapidly evolving business with ever changing requirements, priorities and environments.
In order to address these challenges and to provide an overall dynamic, flexible and scalable IT infrastructure, a radical change in design and strategy was needed. At the core of the new infrastructure design was a dual data centre approach. One data centre was located at the head office, whilst the second was based off site at a dedicated hosting centre.
Both data centres are production sites and each act as failovers to one another, which dramatically increased ATG’s business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. The use of a dedicated hosting centre also alleviated the power, cooling and housing constraints at the head office. The next stage of the design will be to use another dedicated hosting centre and relocate all core IT equipment off site.
Centralised Data
In order to accommodate the centralisation of all of the organisation’s data, NetApp filers were chosen as the preferred storage solution. NetApp filers were implemented at both data centres with appropriate forms of storage (Fibre/SAS/SATA) and sufficient capacity. A range of NetApp software products were utilised to enable rapid recovery of data and two way replication between the two filers.
Traditionally the applications and data were delivered by individually tasked HP Proliant ML and DL servers, running Microsoft operating systems. Considering the increased processing power of modern server hardware, these individually tasked servers became expensive, inefficient and timely to provision. In order to save space within hosted racks and control power and cooling, these servers have been replaced by HP C3000 and C7000 blade chassis.
Deploying Virtualisation
Virtualisation technology has been introduced using VMware ESX V3.5 (soon to be migrated to vSphere) in order to rationalise the need for physical hardware and to implement high availability for key servers and services, without the expense and complexity of traditional clustering.
The introduction of VMware also allows for the rapid provision of additional servers without the cost and the time constraints involved with the traditional approach. The flexibility of the back end NetApp storage in conjunction with thin provisioning enables us to efficiently and quickly deliver storage to the front end services. The NetApp back up tools allow for the regular on line back up of data, which removes the various issues involved with traditional back up regimes and ever decreasing back up windows.
In order to provide the ability for individual users to work at any location with the exact same user environment and experience, Citrix XenApp has been provisioned across a single XenApp farm across both data centres. The use of Citrix’s web interface provides a very simple and easily understood gateway into the user’s particular application set. The utilisation of thin client terminals further reduces the ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ by removing the need for dedicated workstations with their inherent environment costs and reliability issues.
Solution Summary
Centralised, scalable and flexible data storage
Improved data back up and system recovery
Increased business continuity and disaster recovery plan
Simpler and effective security
Reduced cost of ownership, management and support
Consolidated and highly available server estate
Secure, simple and flexible user environment
London Business School
Centralised Storage Solution
The objective was to provide London Business School with a centralised storage solution in order to house the student’s data, the back end storage and the Microsoft Exchange email data. The centralised storage solution needed to provide both the primary performance storage, disaster recovery and off site data back up.
London Business School had an incumbent EMC storage appliance and VMware environment. File storage was primarily based on Novell NetWare, databases were generally SQL based and an Exchange 2003 infrastructure was in situ.
The proposed storage solution needed to deliver to the front end services and servers via fibre channel for the most demanding applications, ISCSI for the lesser demanding applications and use a combination of fibre channel, SAS and SATA drives as appropriate for demands of the system.
Furthermore, the new storage solution needed to be flexible, scalable and deliver using the vendor’s best practices. Novell’s NetWare was to be replaced by files presented by Microsoft’s Active Directory and the storage solution needed to have the ability to back up servers not directly attached or using the storage array.
A NetApp FAS solution was chosen due to its ability to deliver fibre channel, ISCS, CIFS and NFS from the same storage system. A twin head NetApp 3140A Filer was located in the main data centre with shelves containing both fibre channel and SATA drives attached.
The front end servers physically attached to the NetApp Filer by either Brocade Fibre Channel or HP Procurve Ethernet switches. File storage is delivered to the network via CIFS. A second NetApp 3140 Filer was located in a separate data centre as a target for disk to disk back up and as part of the School’s disaster recovery plan.
The NetApp solution involved a range of software products including SnapVault, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, Single Mailbox Recovery, SnapManager for Exchange/SQL/Virtualisatio, FlexClone, A-SIS Dedupe, CIFS, iSCSI and NFS.
During the course of the project, a decision was made to refresh the existing server estate. The existing machines were primarily traditional rack based Dell PowerEdge servers. In order to address growing issues with space, power and cooling, an HP Blade solution was proposed.
Two HP C7000 Blade Enclosures were implemented with dual management modules and appropriate power, fans and layer 2/3 Ethernet switches and Brocade 4Gb SAN switches. The two C7000 blade enclosures were fully populated with BL460c blade servers, some of which were fairly standard in their specifications, whilst the Exchange and SQL servers were highly specified including Fibre Channel Host Bus Adaptors.
Solution Summary
Centralised, scalable and flexible data storage
Improved data back up and system recovery
Increased business continuity and disaster recovery plan
Must accommodate Fibre Channel, iSCSI and a mix of FC, SAS and SATA drives
Removal of NetWare in favour of a Microsoft File System
Consolidated and highly available server estate
High performance throughput for front end servers
