Proact Updates Finish DNA Main Data Centers

Proact IT Group AB will provide new
virtual disk systems for telecommunications group DNA oy‘s main data
centres.

One of the largest investments of DNA this year will enhance the
efficiency of the operative activity and the performance of the storage
infrastructure.

"This was a significant NetApp disk system
investment in our three main data centres. The gross capacity of each of these
virtual disk systems during start-up is approximately 75 terabits. We purchased
Flash Cache cards for the hardware in order to guarantee the performance of
business-critical services," says Antti Tuomaala, IT system planning
manager of DNA Oy. The performance and scalability of our old
systems were either bursting or at the end of their life cycle. The system was
already challenged by different and partly overlapping storage systems."

The
cooperation of DNA and Proact goes back a long time.

Hard disk latency a thing of the past
"The Flash Cache cards speed up data access
significantly in virtual environments: The hot files searched by the operating
systems of the virtual machines can be found directly in the disk system cache.
With this investment, the hard disk latency will be a thing of the past,"
explains Sales Manager Mika Vauhkonen of Proact.

"We settled with DNA on the NetApp FAS3240HA
system and made it the storage platform for virtual environments. We also use
it in parallel as the storage platform of physical servers. We were already
using VMware’s virtualisation technology, in which the Netapp Unified Storage
solution is utilised as the disk resource of virtual machines via NFS and FCP,"
Tuomaala clarifies.

"We are using the new disk system as a
storage system for the virtualisation platforms of server centre services, as
well. It is also utilised in the CRM and invoicing system. Standardising and unifying
the disk system even makes the operative functions work better. In addition,
the standards guarantee a unified operating interface, efficient provisioning,
good availability and competitive server centre productisation,"
describes Tuomaala. "In the future, this projects facilitates
easy and efficient provisioning of cloud services while guaranteeing the
scalability and accessibility of the storage systems."