Factors to Consider When Choosing Accounts Payable Services Providers.pptx
British Medical Association XIV case study
1. IBM XIV Storage Systems Professional services
Case Study
The BMA cures its
storage growing pains
With a mirrored solution based on IBM XIV
Storage Systems
The British Medical Association acts as both a trade union and
Overview professional association dedicated to protecting individual members
and the collective interests of doctors. Founded in 1832, the British
The need
Medical Association is a UK organization formed “to promote the
Reaching the limits of its existing SAN,
medical and allied sciences, and to maintain the honour and interests of the
the BMA needed a fast, robust and
highly scalable data storage platform to medical profession”.
support its business operations.
The BMA is a voluntary and subscribed association. It currently has
The solution
around 144,000 members in all branches of medicine across the UK,
The BMA deployed two IBM® XIV®
Storage Systems, each with 43 TB membership accounts for over two-thirds of practicing UK doctors.
usable capacity, with mirroring for The BMA has a range of representative and scientific committees. It
some volumes, supporting a total of has sole negotiating rights with the UK government for all UK
198 servers running business-critical
applications and databases. registered doctors. The BMJ Group, a wholly owned company of the
organization, is a world-class producer of medical journals, issuing
The benefit 26 specialist monthly publications in addition to the weekly British
Offering ultra-high I/O performance Medical Journal. It also delivers innovative point-of-care medical
and performance that scales in line
with growing capacity, the XIV systems information for clinicians worldwide.
have given the BMA a reliable and
cost-effective platform to support As an information organization, the BMA needs to store increasing
its growth.
volumes of data on its members, policies, science and administration.
The organization runs almost 1,000 desktops in its London HQ, three
national offices and five regional centers; 140 of these are home work-
ers and there are 25 overseas employees. Ensuring good performance
and availability for growing volumes of user data was already becoming
problematic, because the existing Storage Area Network (SAN) was
reliant on end-of-life hardware.
2. IBM XIV Storage Systems Professional services
Case Study
The BMA was facing an even greater challenge around the storage
requirements of its publishing division. As a publisher, the BMA needs
“We are approaching to store and manipulate large volumes of data to support the on-time
90 percent allocation on dissemination of medical information to a worldwide audience. The
organisation is continually adding new online distribution channels and
the XIV systems, and branching out into content-rich web delivery including podcasts and
there has been zero high-definition video streams.
decrease in performance
Martin Kelmanson, Head of ICTS, says: “We were seeing significant
against our baseline growth in storage requirements, and the rate of growth was itself
110 GB of data. The increasing. The existing SAN technology was a year beyond the end of
its planned life, and we had growing concerns about its long-term reli-
XIV solution offers
ability and cost of maintenance. Equally, it was clear that the existing
stunning performance environment would not support our plans to improve availability, per-
thanks to its massive formance and ensure effective business continuity.”
parallelisation of Diagnosing the issues
read/write operations.” The increased growth rate for data at the BMA was putting pressure
on the performance and availability of the organisation’s existing disk
—Frank Edwards, Infrastructure Services storage resources. Equally, the BMA identified the need to unify its
Manager, the British Medical Association divisional storage planning into a single strategic data management
policy that could better tackle the issues of risk management and
business continuity.
In terms of the physical infrastructure, the BMA had a single SAN fab-
ric split across two rooms to enable planned maintenance without the
loss of availability. In total, the environment had 23 TB of usable disk
space, but less than 1 TB remained free for use.
“The existing SAN was in year six of a planned five-year life, and we
could not expand it any further,” says Frank Edwards, Infrastructure
Services Manager. “Trending showed us that we had enough remaining
capacity to accommodate just five or six months’ growth, at which
point we would hit a brick wall.”
Finding a cure
The BMA worked with IBM to deploy two IBM XIV Storage Systems,
with 43 TB usable capacity on each. The XIV systems are synchro-
nously mirrored at volume level to provide added resilience to specific
key systems, and the new SAN fabric offers 4 Gb/s connections to the
BMA’s 198 servers. These run a variety of business-critical systems,
including core human resources, finance and membership applications,
Lotus® Domino® for messaging, BusinessObjects for reporting, and
several Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. The server land-
scape is 40 percent virtualized, with some 85 servers running as virtual
machines on VMware ESX Server.
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3. IBM XIV Storage Systems Professional services
Case Study
“The XIV solution met all of our business and technical requirements,
IBM Solution Components: and we had read a number of positive endorsements of the technology
from other users,” says Frank Edwards. “It was clear that the XIV sys-
Hardware
tems would offer ample scalability, and that they would both reduce
● IBM® XIV® Storage System
our risk and improve the efficiency of storage services to users.
● IBM BladeCenter®
The deployment was fast and smooth—IBM helped us to complete
Software the work over the course of five weekends, on time and within budget.
● IBM Lotus® Domino® They also ran a series of workshops to transfer knowledge and
IBM Business Partner best practices, and we very quickly got up to speed with the XIV
● Logicalis
technology.”
The rapid adoption and ease of use offered by the XIV solution was a
significant advantage for the BMA, which has only a small IT infra-
“The performance gains structure team and operational IT budget. The new mirrored XIV
we’ve seen with the solution removes all administration around RAID setup and mainte-
nance, giving the BMA extremely high levels of protection for data
XIV systems are with zero impact on staff resources. It also delivers ultra-high I/O per-
amazing. For example, formance, even as data volumes grow.
cloning one particular
“We are approaching 90 percent allocation on the XIV systems, and
system used to take over there has been zero decrease in performance against our baseline
30 minutes, and it 110 GB of data,” says Frank Edwards. “The XIV solution offers stun-
ning performance thanks to its massive parallelization of read/write
now takes less than operations.”
15 minutes.”
Performance and resilience
—Frank Edwards, Infrastructure Services The introduction of the XIV systems enabled the BMA to consolidate
Manager, the British Medical Association
and simplify its storage environment, replacing multiple disk arrays
with just two XIV systems.
IT Environment: “The performance gains we’ve seen with the XIV systems are amaz-
ing,” says Frank Edwards. “For example, cloning one particular system
Operating systems
used to take over 30 minutes, and it now takes less than 15 minutes.
● Microsoft® Windows® Server 2000,
2003, 2008 Both administrators and end-users have seen benefits from the signifi-
● Linux® cant improvements in performance for our Oracle production data-
● UNIX® bases: some tasks complete in half the time when compared with the
Databases baseline performance. The XIV systems provide extremely high
● Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008 performance for our business-critical systems even as the volume of
● Oracle data continues to rise.”
Applications
“We have also seen the XIV’s ability to cope with the loss of system
● BusinessObjects
components without degrading performance,” he adds. “Users were
Virtualization unaware that we had lost a module (12 disks), as there was not a blip
● VMware ESX Server on any of our systems when it went offline. Our Helpdesk, which
would previously have lit up when we rebuilt even a single disk on the
old system, was eerily quiet during the rebuild of all 12.”
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