Business challenge
CAE designs, builds and maintains reliable and effective systems for real-time monitoring, decision-making support and alerts during emergencies.
CAE’s solutions are used both to mitigate the risk associated with extreme weather and hydrogeological events and to mitigate the impact of wildfires, as well as monitoring water resources, including water quality.
CAE invests in innovative and interoperable technologies to provide reliable and tough solutions.
CAE’s original environment consisted of a traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) connected through SAS and fiber channel. The manufacturer wanted to update its environment with a split virtualized infrastructure in two separate rooms connected over a LAN to reduce overall costs, and remove any single point of failure. While DataCore and VMware vSAN were shortlisted as options to consider, CAE was compelled by StorMagic’s competitive price point and successfully tested it first.
Solution
Following a strategic consultation with value added distributor, Ready Informatica and value added reseller, 3CiME Technology, CAE chose StorMagic SvSAN to replace its traditional SAN, in a two node VMware vSphere cluster. SvSAN is managed by a VMware vCenter plugin and WebGUI. Since installation, the customer has reduced infrastructure complexity, power consumption and hardware rack space used by the previous physical SAN. The time required for a complete infrastructure reboot has also been reduced by at least ten minutes. SvSAN is significantly more cost-effective than its former solution and eliminates any single point of failure.
Why StorMagic
CAE S.p.A. chose StorMagic SvSAN for several reasons, including:
- Cost effective: Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity x86 server footprint, thereby dramatically lowering costs.
- Easy installation: SvSAN can be deployed as a single server, simple 2-node cluster, or multi-node cluster, with the flexibility to meet changing capacity and performance needs. This is achieved by adding additional capacity to existing servers or by growing the SvSAN cluster, without impacting service availability.
- Energy efficient: Software-defined SvSAN requires much less power and cooling resources than traditional, physical SANs. CAE SpA reduced its power supply requirements by at least two kilowatts.
About 3CiME Technology
3CiME Technology was founded in 2008 by a young and dynamic staff based in Bologna, Italy. 3CiME develops, designs and implements IT solutions and infrastructures for data protection. Its pre-sales and technical teams evaluate customer requirements and budgets and recommend the right solutions to meet the customer’s needs over time, throughout the duration of the IT project. 3CiME’s quality management systems standard certifications include ISO 9001, ISO 27001: 2013 and ISO 20000-1: 2011.
“3CiME Technology resells StorMagic SvSAN because it meets our customers’ requirements. SvSAN is the best hyperconverged solution and delivers high performance at a low cost. Our customers tell us that SvSAN is easy to use, implement and administer, and that its remote monitoring capability ensures business continuity in geographically distributed environments.”
Technical Configuration
Server Configuration (Per Server)
| SvSAN License | SvSAN 2TB Gold |
| Hardware | 2 Lenovo servers (per site) |
| CPU | 2 CPUs, 8 cores per CPU |
| Memory | 256GB |
| Storage | 2TB; 6x 1.2TB SAS 10K, 4x RAID-1 volumes with hot spare disk |
| Networking | 1GbE, direct connection; IPSEC VPN through ADSL/VDSL lines typically 3MBs/30Mbs; 8 network cards per server |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere Essentials Plus |
| Applications | Microsoft SQL server, back office database, website and data services |
| Data Protection | Veeam |
Simple
Provides a true ‘set and forget’ solution for any environment using centralized deployment and management – whether for thousands of sites or just one.
Cost-Effective
Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint thereby dramatically lowering costs.
Flexible
Delivers on today’s performance needs leveraging any CPU and storage type whilst avoiding over-provisioning with the confidence of scaling for tomorrow’s demands.
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