Quoting from vnunet

Unipart Logistics is moving towards a virtual storage environment to maximise its server investment and gain fast access to business critical data.

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To ensure systems did not fail and to avoid high maintenance costs, Unipart decided to move away from a direct attached storage environment and deploy a scalable, networked storage infrastructure for better information management. At the same time, it also decided to upgrade its SAP environment, and selected storage specialist EMC to support this move.

EMC’s Symmetrix storage and IBM servers were chosen to provide a platform for meeting increasing business demands. The system went live in March 2005.

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He says this move will enable Unipart to provision storage across its servers, reducing risk of failure and lowering overall management costs. Unipart is in the process of implementing its tiered storage strategy.

Mountjoy says that classifying data is time-consuming because of the number of considerations, which include looking at data volumes, determining the business criticality of data, determining what data is less business critical, finding a more cost-effective system to store it which can still be accessed, and looking at backup procedures.

Unipart is also setting policies to support information lifecycle management. ‘Policies must be written and endorsed in such a way so they take effect automatically to remove the choice element, but they must work with the business, such as the need to retain legal and financial data. A balance must be struck between business needs, practicalities and cost,’ said Mountjoy.

In the future, he says virtualisation will allow Unipart to make savings by allowing business units not associated with Jaguar to have their data hosted on the EMC environment.

‘The shared environment will be structured to maintain the integrity of clients’ data, and Unipart can gain economies of scale,’ says Mountjoy.

Read the original article, here.