UK's Channel Five, has deployed four EqualLogic PS400E storage arrays to provide more than 30 terabytes of storage capacity for rapidly growing digital media data and to ensure business continuity. 

This deployment complements the company’s virtualised server environment, allowing Five to optimise its entire IT infrastructure for simple management and reliable disaster recovery capabilities.

The increasing demand from viewers for easily accessible digital media content made it critical for the company to have a scalable storage and server infrastructure. The shift in user demand from analogue to larger, digital files caused an explosion in the volume of data that Five needed to house and have available, which was a burden for its IT department to manage. To keep pace with this fast growing amount of data, Ken Davis, CIO at Five, evaluated both Fibre Channel and iSCSI products. He chose to implement a virtualised storage environment based on EqualLogic’s PS Series iSCSI storage arrays due to their cost-effective, enterprise-class performance and flexible management capabilities.

"Our storage requirements are vast: we need to store company data as well as have digital content available for viewers to access on demand,” said Davis. “However, as a relatively small IT department, we could not afford to have staff resources dedicated solely to supporting a SAN. To solve this problem, we chose EqualLogic’s PS Series storage arrays, which offer us a cost-effective solution that requires little on-going management. Our IT team can now focus on other priorities, including the continual enhancement of content and applications, which is critical for our success as a business in the digital world.”

In addition to deploying a PS400E array for content management, Five purchased another PS400E when faced with a data warehousing project to provide additional capability and redundancy. The PS400E’s auto-replication feature, standard in each array, ensures protection of the company’s important data. “We had already proven the efficiency and performance of the PS400E array in our IT environment, so our warehousing project was easy to tackle. Upon receiving the SAN, we were able to plug it in and connect it overnight, saving significant amounts of time and money. This type of near-zero configuration is unheard of with other iSCSI players in the market; it’s clear that EqualLogic operates on a customer-driven level,” commented Davis.

Five runs two more PS400E arrays at disaster recovery sites. The PS400E’s auto-replication capability provides point-in-time periodic replication to the remote site for restore points and application-consistent copies of data. In the event of any issue, critical data can be restored within minutes. With EqualLogic, Five is able to achieve affordable disaster recovery without expensive add-on software or costly staff training.

Five is using EqualLogic alongside server virtualisation from VMware to centralise management capabilities and improve availability throughout the company’s IT infrastructure. By operating in a completely virtualised environment, Five is able to shift virtual machines around the network based on user demands without administrative intervention or manual tuning, eliminating the need to spend additional resources on new servers or add-on software. This flexibility is essential as Five continues to deliver new services and content to viewers; it will also allow Davis to ensure business continuity throughout the company’s operations by eradicating downtime. 

Operating in real-time and with automated load balancing software, the EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN optimises access to Five’s most popular applications, including the latest programme downloads from the Internet.  Each PS400E ensures Five’s maximum capacity and optimal performance with a virtualised array of 14 750-gigabyte SATA drives; a fully configured chassis delivers 10.5 terabytes of raw storage capacity in an enterprise-class iSCSI SAN built on fully redundant, hot-swappable hardware. Self-managing and expandable online, the PS400E maintains 99.999 percent application and data availability.

EqualLogic makes data storage systems that radically simplify the way mid-size and large businesses store and protect information.  EqualLogic’s award-winning PS Series storage area network (SAN) solution provides sophisticated management capabilities that reduce the time and money IT staff spend on storage.  EqualLogic serves thousands of customers in 35 countries from its headquarters in Nashua, New Hampshire, and offices throughout Europe and Asia

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