As a centre of excellence for interdisciplinary investigation and problem solving across plant and bee health, crop protection, sustainable agriculture, food and feed quality and chemical safety in the environment, Fera is renowned nationally and internally. Fera users are both internal employees; predominantly scientists accessing information and readings in order to make recommendations for optimal yields, alongside external customers; with Fera providing services to 7,500 commercial Agri Food customers alongside UK governmental organisations including DEFRA (Department of Environment, Farming & Rural Affairs).
Ben Jones, is the Data Centre Manager at Fera: “Today Fera provides a large, single campus modern metro cluster split across 2 sites for assured High Availability and we enjoy fast performance even in peak transaction times. Roll-back five years and the situation was less clear with a large, fragmented estate that contained a mix of legacy devices, brands and technology. We needed an overlay layer that would unify and manage our assets maximising the investment that we had already made. We ultimately found this using software defined storage provided though DataCore’s SANsymphony-V platform. ”
Dealing with a quadrupling data set every 4 years:
Going back in time five years, Fera’s then beleaguered IT Team took the decision to go back to the drawing board to address the multiple problem areas whilst future-proofing the size of the data set. Containing Fera’s diverse and sprawling IT server and storage estate was the first pressing issue for the team, with multiple Dell/HP/NetApp/IBM standalone servers and hundreds of legacy Direct Attached and Network Attached Storage devices across the mirrored data centre. Each year, IT had the onerous task of accurately anticipating the up-front storage requirements of departmental storage - or risk running out of space if storage had been inadvertently designated to another path. Performing maintenance, upgrades and critical updates across so many brands was also a huge overhead. Each time maintenance was performed, the mirrored device also had to be disabled, taken offline and then resumed. IT also wished to curtail the ongoing spiralling cost of network connections, multiples of which had been added in an effort to assist business continuity.
For the Fera user internally, the flailing IT infrastructure manifested in ongoing issues with speed of access to their applications, together with the inability to mine reports and record and access information as the maintenance window grew. At different times across the seasons, productivity levels dwindled further still as vast swathes of data arrived in unpredictable, colossal batches. The clustered NetApp setup was becoming restrictive, meaning that the VMware hosted application performance was becoming an ongoing bottleneck as applications competed for I/O. The IT team selected DataCore’s software to run on a pair of Dell 2U PowerEdge 2950s and thereby centralising the VMware critical hosts to improve performance and allow live migration of VMs without downtime. Time progressed and five years on and with upgrades to SANsymphony-V for full enterprise virtualisation, all data is now accessed through SANsymphony-V and it is now the established software defined backbone to Fera’s ongoing IT infrastructure. Today, Fera provides its members with a large, modern metro cluster split across 2 same-campus sites for high availability. Through DataCore, Fera offers twelve VMware VSphere 5.1 ESX hosts running 300 VMs offering essential business applications. Additionally, SANsymphony-V manages and protects 250 physical servers with all legacy NetApp storage served and front-ended by DataCore’s SANsymphony-V.
All of Fera’s storage pools and virtual disks are mirrored giving ongoing availability. Downtime is firmly an issue of the past as through SANsymphony-V, one side of the mirror stays functioning and fully available, while IT perform patches, Windows updates, backend fixes and essential critical updates to the other side.
Availability and Freedom of Choice Right Across the Estate:
High Availability is now assured within Fera. This became increasingly important nine months ago when Fera formed a joint commercial partnership with DEFRA (Department of Environment, Farming & Rural Affairs) to provide 24x7 access to focussed research across both organisations.
Ben continues “Essentially DataCore gives us the freedom of procurement across the estate. That’s a powerful statement. We can now research and select which disk chassis and vendors are most suited to Fera and select those which we know will have the best controllers and offer the highest density. Using DataCore as the software layer, we have found ourselves being able to confidently migrate away from incumbent brands as management is now unified and assured. With it, we have significantly reduced the ongoing maintenance overhead.”
DataCore’s Auto-Tiering feature assists Fera to correctly allocate over 1 PB of data. Auto-Tiering is used extensively within the environment with a quadruple tiering policy allocating and automating data into the most appropriate class of storage. For Fera this entails critical user data being allocated to Tier 1 (SSDs); – Vmware specific and scientific data to Tier 2 (Fibre Channel SAS);- general data apportioned to Tier 3 (nearline SATA disks); and lastly, archiving data (including the vast quantities of raw science data sets) which are allocated to Tier 4 (held on repurposed SATA drives). This final re-purposed tier allows Fera without any additional overhead, to be able to retrieve if required for compliance, data sets from over 5 years ago.
Ben concludes: “We are so confident in DataCore that we have based our entire environment upon it. Using DataCore, Fera now has a single management interface across our hundreds of disparate devices. It has become the cornerstone to our data centre.”
