ORIGINALLY POSTED 25th April 2008

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One of the nice things with working on SVC is actually helping customers to solve their day to day storage headaches. We all know and feel the pains caused by the ever increasing amount of storage media needed in our SANs. The management costs, from a people and resource point of view alone start to spiral out of control and adding yet another box that needs another set of skills to maintain or provision becomes a nightmare.

Thats where storage virtualization comes in, and in particular SVC. Over at http://www.information-age.com there is a great example of how the London Natural History Museum have used SVC and IBM Disk/Tape products to tame their SAN. The Natural Selection of Storage.

The solution was implemented with the help of IBM UK Business Partner, Tectrade and in the customer’s own words has provided exactly what SVC can : Quotes from Gavin Malarky – senior infrastructure analyst at the museum.

“The ease of management that virtualisation gives us made our lives a lot easier – flexibility and expandability within a single management console,”

“We don’t talk about archiving data any more, we just move it from online to near-line”

“The benefit is that, if we want to add another 10TBs, we can get another IBM DS4100 or buy disks elsewhere, sit them behind the SVC and, at the front end, it is all the same – simply a storage resource to the server”

The IBM SVC product pages have a detailed case study covering the Museums solution, for anyone with similar headaches I’d recommend they have a read and contact IBM or their local IBM Business Partner to discuss their needs and see if SVC can help them in the same way.