Canadian St. John Ambulance Chooses HP LeftHand P4500

Hewlett-Packard
Company announced that St.
John Ambulance has selected HP storage and server solutions to improve
scalability and increase availability to support the organization’s daily
operations of providing first aid services and training across Alberta, Canada.

Recently, St. John Ambulance began working with HP reseller partner Metafore IT Solutions, Inc. on a transition
to a virtualized environment using VMware vSphere 4.0. As the company moved
applications into this virtualized environment, it was apparent that a VMware
cluster with centralized storage would offer the scalability needed to adapt to
changing business needs while ensuring continuity.

The organization evaluated various options for centralized storage,
including solutions from EMC. Ultimately it chose HP
LeftHand P4500 Storage – a virtualized iSCSI-based storage solution – and HP
ProLiant DL380 G6 servers to run applications such as its file servers,
email server, Active Directory server and Linux applications.

The network RAID feature offered in HP LeftHand Storage enabled St.
John Ambulance to protect multiple copies of data and eliminate a single point
of failure, allowing continuous availability of applications.

Thin provisioning an efficiency technology that increases overall
storage system utilization, enabled the organization to set up servers without over-provisioning dedicated storage capacity, as the system uses only the space
it needs. The LeftHand snapshot feature provided the ability to roll back an
application configuration for restore, with a minimum of capacity required.

"One of the biggest
benefits delivered by HP LeftHand Storage is the cost savings that results from
elimination of extra software licenses typical of competing storage solutions.
HP’s solution provides for enough redundancy, computing and storage power to
meet our needs in one system," said Joe Zasada, manager, technical services,
St. John Ambulance. "We get
enterprise-level features, but not the enterprise price – and it scales so
easily we can grow without worrying about redesigning everything from the
ground up."

Easy upgrades and improved redundancy St. John Ambulance
discovered that the setup and management of its new storage environment was simple, offering 99.999% uptime with a clustered configuration,
and a reduction in management time. In addition, rapid download and
installation of storage upgrades reduced maintenance costs and enabled to expand its storage network on the fly.

LeftHand ensures business continuity. Features such as multi-site SAN availability can stretch a single system across two sites by assigning
storage nodes in the cluster to different locations. This provides HA with failover and failback across sites.

"To facilitate the delivery of innovative
first aid services and training, St. John Ambulance needed to refresh its
storage network with a solution that was easy to deploy, scale and maintain,"
said Jeff Wilson, national sales manager, Storage, HP Canada. "HP LeftHand Storage delivered enterprise
functionality that enhanced their virtual environments, simplified management
and reduced costs, while ensuring their crucial business data remained
available."