Business issues
After moving to a distributed environment with an extensive Internet portal, and in spite of added storage devices, SD WORX experienced an acute shortage of storage capacity. Its infrastructure seemed inadequate to support a flexible disaster recovery scenario; recovery from any disaster that occurred would be complex. Because of a lack of interconnectivity, the processing environment made the task of overall management laborious. Poor performance in the storage environment resulted in back-office delays that slowed down front-office response times.

Solutions
In an evolution that took only two months, StorageTek devised and implemented an information lifecycle management solution that permitted SD WORX to keep its existing machines but reconfigured them to correct interconnectivity problems. A FlexLine™ V2X Shared Virtual Array (SVA™) disk system, a FlexLine FLX280 enterprise storage system and two StorageTek Brocade® Silkworm® 12000 directors were added, along with the MirrorStore™ appliance server to accomplish proper mirroring of data.

Financial benefits
StorageTek’s solution has saved SD WORX a considerable amount of time, which is likely to translate into savings on critical resources, particularly human resources.

Business benefits
The SD WORX capacity problem resolved immediately: capacity rose from two to eight terabytes. Expansion will not be necessary for two years, but when it is needed, capacity can grow in a simple, modular way. Problems in performance have disappeared, as have worries about disaster recovery. Delays in the back office and front office are now a thing of the past.

Technology benefits
The new infrastructure at SD WORX also presents a number of interesting technological opportunities. These include support for solutions that were previously inconceivable — for example, an acceptance environment for new applications on the V960 SVA disk system, a part of the company’s “before-project” storage system.