Wholesale distribution company HD Supply has deployed Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability and Veritas Operations Manager software offerings to help it consolidate 22 data centres into three.
With the new deployments, HD Supply realised more than $2m in storage and disaster recovery costs, eliminated Severity 1 and 2 incidents, experienced a two-fold faster cluster server deployment, and significantly reduced the time IT staffers must spend on cluster management, said Symantec in a statement.
Working with Symantec Platinum Partner Agilysys, HD Supply implemented Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability to manage all critical clusters for Linux environment, which was stabilised by Veritas Storage Foundation HA.
To simplify heterogeneous storage management, Veritas Cluster Server to monitor and automate failover for applications in case of failure, and Veritas Volume Replicator, an option to replicate data over IP networks as an alternative to traditional array-based data replication architectures Veritas Storage Foundation HA combines Veritas Storage Foundation.
HD Supply IT Platform Services senior-director Brad Cowles said HD Supply deployed traditional Linux-based clusters to maximise the availability of business-critical applications, but when internal network problems occurred, and a multi-node Linux cluster for a mission-critical Oracle database didn’t fail over as expected.
"With Veritas Storage Foundation HA, the IT team can roll out a business-critical clustered service twofold faster than with a traditional Linux cluster. We’re delivering more than double the number of clustered back ends this year with no increase in headcount," Cowles said.
"Becoming array-agnostic is a big plus because it lowers the complexity of providing disaster recovery to applications that don’t need to run on a Tier 1 SAN. We have storage from HP, Hitachi, Pillar, NetApp, and EMC — and with Veritas Storage Foundation HA, I have a lot more flexibility in my choices."
