Fordway Solutions Installed Storage Infrastructure for Peabody

ICT integrator Fordway Solutions Limited has completed the design and supported the installation of a new storage and business continuity infrastructure for Peabody, the London housing association.

The new solution has enabled Peabody to consolidate its data storage onto a robust infrastructure, and has reduced data recovery time from a day to around 15 minutes for key systems. Automated data progression combined with multiple tiers of storage ensures data is instantly allocated to the appropriate level of storage, eliminating the need for detailed progression planning and freeing Peabody’s IT team to focus on other activities.

A review of Peabody’s infrastructure indicated a clear need for a new solution for recovery from disaster and business continuity solution. The association chose the Compellent based solution proposed by Fordway to provide both business continuity and handle a significant increase in its requirement for storage of data.

The infrastructure comprises two storage area networks, one at the primary site (Peabody’s headquarters) and at the secondary site in its office at Kings Cross. The primary site has a fully redundant dual controller, both fibre and SATA disks and a fibre channel switch, with an iSCSI switch as failover. The secondary site has a single controller and SATA disks, enabling it to handle the same amount of data using lower cost storage.

Fordway tailored the system to Peabody’s needs, installed the infrastructure within two weeks, and provided advice on data migration. Peabody’s IT team is now migrating its production systems onto the SAN one at a time, with support available from Fordway if required. As systems are migrated they are replicated automatically onto the back-up SAN, enabling Peabody to restore systems much more quickly if there is any loss of service at its main site.

John Welch, Head of IT at Peabody, said: "We knew we had to increase our storage capacity and we required a comprehensive, robust and easily managed solution which would replicate our data and remove the reliance on tapes for recovery. Fordway gave us confidence that it understood our needs and designed a solution that exceeded our expectations. We were very impressed with the speed of the installation, and we had the flexibility to carry out the migration ourselves while Fordway was on hand with support if we needed it."

"We offer a ‘best of breed’ storage and business continuity solution which we can tailor to meet each organisation’s individual needs," says Richard Blanford, managing director of Fordway. "As we demonstrated for Peabody, we are happy to work in a flexible way to complement in-house resources and expertise. Together we can fine-tune a solution to deliver exactly what each customer needs."