Dundee City Council Employs StoreAge SVM For Cost-Effective Storage Virtualization Management

StoreAge Networking Technologies, an innovator in enterprise SAN storage management, today announced the deployment of its SVM (Storage Virtualisation Manager) at Dundee City Council, the local government authority for the City of Dundee, Scotland's fourth largest city. The deployment was effected in cooperation with Bytes Technology Group, a key StoreAge partner in the UK.

Dundee is the regional centre for Tayside and boasts a local population of over 145,000 and a travel-to-work population of over 200,000. The population is boosted during academic term times when over 34,000 people study in the city. Dundee City Council's IT division is responsible for the provision of all information processing and computing facilities, and has recently been required to support many government initiatives to bring IT and Internet services to the general public, within very tight cost constraints.

The Council was using a SAN (Storage Area Network), and soon realized that the initial promise of SANs - namely the easy, arbitrary and flexible allocation and re-allocation of any storage at any time to any server - was not achievable in reality, due to the complexity and difficulty of the management interface to the SAN. In addition, because of the proprietary nature of the disk-array based SAN, they could not deploy "lower cost" storage for less demanding requirements, making SAN-based storage prohibitively expensive for many projects. In order to truly realise the promise of SANs, they needed to greatly simplify their SAN management and increase its flexibility. After examining various solutions, they chose StoreAge's SVM, as it enables them to tier storage so that high-end storage systems can be assigned to demanding applications while legacy, lower-end storage resources are used for less demanding services. SVM allows them to easily manage a heterogeneous, "layered" storage environment, with IBM ESS at tier 1, DELL CLARiiON at tier 2, and ATA disk at tier 3.

By centralizing the provisioning, performance optimization and protection of storage across heterogeneous hosts and storage devices, SVM dramatically reduces the cost of SAN storage management. SVM was able to deliver Dundee City Council these key benefits:

• Centralized and simplified management of storage across heterogeneous operating systems and storage devices from different vendors
• Pooling of storage capacity and performance across the entire SAN space
• Effective utilisation of the organization's storage resources
• Efficient provisioning, expansion and reallocation of storage resources to servers and applications on an as-needed basis, without disturbing the operational applications involved
• Elimination of most day-to-day LUN and volume management tasks
• Ability to easily scale in a rapidly growing, highly available SAN environment

Tim Simpson, IT Support Manager for Dundee City Council, said: "The UK Government are requiring local authorities to provide a number of Internet related services to the general public, at cost levels within their guidelines. Using traditional storage concepts Dundee City Council would not have been able to meet this challenge. However, with a tiered storage infrastructure based around StoreAge SVM, we are able to make available terabytes of storage space for these public access projects, at a price-point within our guidelines. This has been made possible by the flexibility and power of the StoreAge SVM environment. Bytes Technology Group took care of all aspects of the design and implementation of the solution, including working with our existing storage product vendors; to ensure a coherent, scalable, tiered storage infrastructure."

Neil Murphy, Managing Director at Bytes, noted: "StoreAge's unique technology lets us offer our customers a solution that really changes the rules in storage management, resulting in much lower TCO. The excellent support received from StoreAge helped us meet our customers' demands in the best way possible."

"We are happy to cooperate with Bytes in providing Dundee a complete, cost-effective solution." Added Dani Naor, Vice President of Business Development at StoreAge. "Many organizations are realizing the true potential of our solutions and coming to depend on SVM for enhanced storage management."

To learn more about SVM and other StoreAge solutions, please visit our website www.store-age.com or email us: info@store-age.com.

About StoreAge Networking Technologies
StoreAge Networking Technologies is an innovative developer and provider of enterprise storage management solutions that centralize and simplify storage network administration. StoreAge network-based solutions provide a uniform, SAN-wide method for provisioning storage, ensuring business continuity, enabling cost-effective disaster recovery, and centrally managing cross-platform, multi-vendor storage environments.

StoreAge's flagship product, SVM (Storage Virtualization Manager), has been successfully deployed worldwide, gaining exceptional success in managing storage in a wide variety of application environments including databases, OLTP, e-mail, ERP, CRM, video and many others. StoreAge offers worldwide sales, support and service, with principal offices in Irvine, CA and Nesher, Israel, and is a privately held company spun-off from IIS Intelligent Information Systems (IISLF.OB) in 1999. For additional information, visit the StoreAge website at www.store-age.com or contact the company at info@store-age.com.

About Bytes Technology Group
Bytes Technology Group is a specialist IT services company providing a range of technical skills and services to support corporate networks based on industry standard technologies. These services enable companies to exploit commercial opportunities available to them through the effective use of information technology. Our skills are focused on matching business drivers with technical reality so that cost of ownership is lowered and value of investment is maximised. With the benefit of over 20 years' experience in the UK, a wealth of referenced IT implementations and the majority of our staff dedicated to service delivery, we can guarantee our customers effective IT solutions – first time. Our key partners are the world's market leaders who provide best-of-breed hardware, software and communication solutions. We are amongst the very few companies that maintain both the highest accreditations and senior contacts with major vendors such as Microsoft, Compaq, Citrix, EMC2 and IBM which benefit our customers through increased profile, availability and involvement. For additional information, please visit www.bytes.co.uk.

About Dundee City Council
Dundee is a vibrant, attractive and flourishing city that is forging new developments in the biotech and digital media sectors. Scotland's fourth city, Dundee is the base for two universities and enjoys excellent communications links. Dundee is the regional centre for Tayside and boasts a local population of 145,000 and a travel to work population of over 200,000. Dundee City Council is providing online transactions through its www.dundeecity.gov.uk website for rent and council tax payments and also online concert bookings at www.dundee.com.