Redstor on hand to empower a large UK energy organisation

We have recently successfully completed a long term consultancy project at a large organisation operating in the UK energy market. Redstor were employed to join the customers Storage Team and to develop and document its ‘storage strategy’, including the strategic objective, long-term vision and roadmap, a strategy that would be followed through this year and next and would re-shape the storage environment and provide a stable platform from which to support the business.

The large, multi-vendor, heterogeneous infrastructure had grown up largely in support of point solutions, specific project, departmental or inter-company initiatives and consisted of in excess of a thousand servers, two large isolated Storage Area Networks hosting multiple storage systems, a mix of backup and recovery applications and tape libraries with differing tape technologies. With approximately 240Tb's worth of data, the environment was difficult to manage, it was managed in ‘silos’, spread across several support teams with no common processes or tools. The aim was to create a consolidated environment that was scalable and could realise efficiencies through economies of scale, eliminating redundant hardware and software costs and streamlining administrative effort.

Redstor were able to call upon a variety of technology partners, reinforcing our stance of having a best-of-breed and independent approach. Some of these partners included Symantec, IBM, HP, NetApp, SUN and Brocade.

Considering the history of the current infrastructure, the limitations of the existing designs and the requirements for further growth, the strategy was split into four themes consisting of consolidated backup and recovery, disk storage consolidation, consolidation of file services and the development of the existing Storage Area Networks. The process of developing the strategy involved the customer outlining a direction that we challenged and shaped, using our many years of experience working with thousands of organizations, large and small, in different markets and using our understanding of technology, what works, what doesn’t and through a series of interactive, face-to-face sessions.

The consultancy was completed on time and has resulted in a well received, documented strategy, a ‘blueprint’, that articulates and controls what the future enterprise storage infrastructure environment will look like and will aid transition planning from the current ‘as-is’ environment to the new ‘to-be’ environment.