Ports of Auckland, New Zealand’s leading port company, is employing DataCore SANsymphony storage virtualisation software to create a new virtual storage infrastructure.

Ports of Auckland provides a broad range of cargo handling and logistics services which need to operate day and night to serve New Zealand’s vital international trade and shipping needs.

Ports of Auckland was an early adopter of server virtualisation and today 95 percent of its server infrastructure is virtualised. The IT team turned to DataCore to make the disks at both its primary and secondary sites look like one virtualised SAN to the VMware farm.

The SANsymphony storage virtualisation software runs on a pair of IBM x3650 servers in front of Xiotech Storage Blades.

Because SANsymphony synchronously mirrors the storage at both sites and automatically routes I/O requests to the appropriate hardware regardless of where it is, the Ports of Auckland’s IT staff no longer has to worry about site outages. In addition, just as server virtualisation improves CPU utilisation, SANsymphony storage virtualisation improves disk space utilisation through thin provisioning. They now create new virtual disks from the storage pool in a matter of seconds, and the software only takes up the space actually being written to.

“One of the things that drew me personally to SANsymphony was that it is software,” said Craig Beetlestone, lead systems engineer at Ports of Auckland.

“With SANsymphony, we buy it once. We own it. And we can swap out the box that it runs on at will as well as the underlying disks. That’s a big bonus. It can easily save us $100,000 or more when we go to the next generation of hardware.”