Business Challenge
The Security Center of Iceland was founded in 1995 and provides on-site security, remote surveillance, CCTV and guarding services, as well as welfare products, including intrusion systems, fire alarms and extinguishing systems. Key customers served are healthcare organizations, retail stores, airlines, event venues and VIP customers. The IT department offers advisory services, leads managed services for projects, and oversees data management, monitoring and performance.
The Security Center’s monitoring center demands 24×7 availability to support the guards and security systems that they deploy and manage, for mission-critical services. This center was previously located outside of the main offices and only had redundancy for a limited number of critical components, not for all systems. Two initial goals for an IT refresh were to relocate the offsite monitoring center to the main office location, and to add virtualization with triple redundancy in house and to its remote site.
Ásgeir Rúnar Viðarsson, the IT Manager in charge of the project, began researching simple, cost-effective solutions that would future-proof the center’s network for four to five years, with a focus on virtual SAN solutions, as the ideal route to achieve his goals.
Solution
The Security Center of Iceland previously used a mix of servers from HP, IBM and Lenovo. They were able to eliminate two full racks in the server room by replacing them with just two Dell servers running StorMagic SvSAN software.
The Center moved its data from the previous hardware and virtual machines to two local, active physical servers and one off-site server by adding a 10Gbit networking backbone. The Dell servers offer ample built-in disk storage capacity, so no additional hardware was required. At the primary site, SvSAN is running on two hosts, with replication to the remote site through Veeam software.
Competing virtual SAN solutions considered were more cumbersome, required dedicated hosts and networking equipment, and were simply too expensive to maintain. With SvSAN, The Security Center of Iceland has gained significantly more processing power and memory for a fraction of the cost of competing VMware solutions – and will meet their requirements for many years into the future.
Why StorMagic
The Security Center of Iceland chose StorMagic SvSAN for several reasons, including:
- Increased performance: Real-world application testing proved a 40-70 percent improvement in running complex/long processes in its Dynamics Nav ERP system and big SQL reports.
- More compute for less cost: The Security Center of Iceland’s new solution includes 50 percent more memory, 25 percent more cores and 40 percent more CPU resources (in GHz) at a lower price as compared to the other option considered (VxRail).
- High availability: The SvSAN solution supports the Center’s requirement for 24×7 uptime.
- Exceptional support: From configuration and installation to customer service, StorMagic has met and exceeded The Security Center of Iceland’s needs.
Technical Configuration
| Server Configuration (Per Server) | |
| SvSAN License | SvSAN Unlimited TB Platinum |
| Hardware | Dell |
| CPU | 2 sockets with 20 cores per CPU |
| Memory | 768GB |
| Storage | Approximately 28TB |
| Networking | Four 10Gbit cards |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere Essentials Plus |
| 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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