VW Financial Services builds virtualised SAN

Volkswagen Financial Services (VFS UK) has managed a complete return on investment within three months after implementing a virtualised Storage Area Network solution.

The organisation, which employs 450 staff and offers financial services products to around 800 automotive outlets, including Audi, Bentley, SEAT, Skoda, Volkswagen and VW Commercial Vehicles, lent more than £1bn in 2006.

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VFS UK runs two data centres in Milton Keynes to support internal staff and provide application support to the UK retailer networks. In compliance with the Financial Services Act, the organisation ran two mirrored data-recovery sites to support the 100 servers comprising its storage network.

The organisation has installed a solution from storage specialist Datacore, called SANmelody, which automatically manages the space allocation in each server, balancing the storage load and reducing the chance of failure.

In a statement, VFS UK senior networking specialist Mike Duxbury, said: "We recognised that immediate savings could be gained, as the solution would only allocate the disk space that was needed, and we could simply replace or plug in more disk; whereas, in the past, we had to over-allocate disk space and partitioning requirements."

Duxbury went on to illustrate how the new solution had successfully kept the storage network up and running after a server failure.

He said: "As a result of disk failure, one server went offline but the auto-failover function kicked in, switching the servers to the mirrored site and began to seamlessly rebuild the volumes in the background. The failing server was rebuilt within minutes - all with minimal intervention from the team."