Denmark City Esbjerg Kommune Enhances IT Services With Fusion-io

Fusion-io, Inc. announced that
the Danish city of Esbjerg Kommune has virtualized
its Exchange 2010 infrastructure with Fusion ioTurbine virtualization
caching software to support a range of community services, including its
entrepreneurship program.

Integrated into the server with Fusion’s ioDrive memory platform, the VMware
vMotion-compatible caching software enabled Esbjerg to virtualize its
20,000-user Exchange environment and also achieved a 40 percent reduction on
its existing SAN workload, extending the investment in
its existing storage system and freeing these resources for future growth.

"The latency of a SAN is
milliseconds, and we were seeking a solution that could provide more I/O with
faster response time than our SAN. Putting solid-state technology in the system
is a quick fix, but it does not really help that much in terms of response
time," said Esben Foverskov, head of IT Infrastructure, Esbjerg
Kommune. "When we put Exchange 2010
into production with ioTurbine, the results were significant. Outlook was
extremely responsive and we no longer had I/O issues stemming from traditional
storage infrastructures and their associated latency. The deployment not only
solved our immediate performance needs, but also improved the overall return on
investment associated with our existing SAN."

Located on the southwest coast of Denmark, Esbjerg Kommune is Denmark’s fifth
largest city and is the main base for Denmark’s offshore activities related to
oil, gas and wind energy. Esbjerg was running Exchange 2003 and was working to
upgrade to Exchange 2010 as well as virtualize the deployment. Esbjerg’s goal
in virtualizing the environment was to reduce operational expenses related to
service, manageability and ease of administration, as well as to preserve the
existing storage architecture, in order to minimize capital equipment costs and
continuing the use of existing back-up and DR solutions.

Esbjerg deployed ioTurbine on Fusion ioDrive hardware to address the I/O issues
associated with virtualization and avoid an expensive SAN upgrade. The
ioTurbine caching software installs in VMware’s
ESXi as a vLun driver and as a component in the guest operating system. Caching
then becomes an attribute of the workload, targeting performance to loads with
high data demand that require acceleration. Fusion ioTurbine now supports
VMware ESXi 5.0 virtualization hypervisor, enabling customers using 4.x or 5.0
versions of ESXi to benefit from integrating the ioTurbine software to enhance
VMware performance.

"As environmental and fiscal issues
associated with data centers become a concern for communities around the world,
municipalities like Esbjerg Kommune are using innovation to ease data center energy
demands and realize compelling savings in capital and operational expenditures,"
said Rich Boberg, GM of Fusion-io Virtualization Solutions Group. "Virtualization is a great way to reduce
power costs and infrastructural spending, however, many organizations seeking
to virtualize soon discover that potential savings are eaten up by having to
build out existing storage arrays to accommodate increased data needs.
Recognizing this, Esbjerg Kommune deployed ioTurbine software to fully take
advantage of server-side flash and direct this performance to virtualized
database applications, achieving the return on investment that virtualization
was meant to deliver."