Huffy Corporation Ensures High Data Availability in a Virtualized Server Environment with Infortrend’s ESVA

Huffy Corporation Ensures High Data Availability in a Virtualized Server Environment with Infortrend’s ESVA

The Huffy Corporation, based in Ohio in the United States, has been developing and manufacturing cutting-edge bicycles since the end of the 19th century. With distribution channels in different regions of the world, Huffy has extensive operations that require robust datacenters to efficiently manage data.

Huffy had previously adopted a server virtualization environment with VMware vSphere, but relied on local disk drives of its servers to meet storage demand. With business continuing to grow, using this method for data storage became inefficient, and the company went looking for new methods to enhance data storage and improve efficiency of its virtualized datacenter.

The Challenge: Optimize Data Storage in Virtualized Server Environment

Huffy was operating a virtualized server environment using VMware’s vSphere solution. However, data storage was achieved with local disks of servers, which proved not to be very efficient in terms of data availability, power usage and datacenter space utilization.

The Solution and Its Benefits: Infortrend’s iSCSI-host ESVA Solution

Aiming to enhance operations, Huffy started to evaluate new solutions that could improve data storage and be easily fitted into the company’s existing datacenter infrastructure. In addition, the company hoped that the new solution would deliver high availability (HA) features and remote replication capabilities to strengthen data availability. After a thorough assessment of products available on the market, Huffy selected Infortrend’s ESVA E60 solution.

Centralized Data Storage

The iSCSI-host ESVA E60 provides centralized data storage for all applications Huffy is running in its virtualized architecture. By offloading all data to the ESVA E60, Huffy has been able to significantly reduce power consumption and footprint of its datacenter.

High Availability (HA) Architecture

By deploying the ESVA E60 instead of relying solely on the local disks of servers, Huffy has achieved a high availability (HA) architecture that makes it much more resilient against individual server failures. In the past, if one of the servers failed, data stored on the server could no longer be accessed, creating significant risks for applications running on that server. Now, even if one of the servers fails, applications can still access their data as it is centrally stored on the ESVA E60. Huffy is therefore able to better deal with unforeseen events in the datacenter and reduce downtime.

Advanced Disaster Recovery

At the time of the ESVA E60 purchase, Huffy was already developing advanced disaster recovery plans in anticipation of a new datacenter site that would become available in the near future. Therefore, Huffy was looking for a system that provided remote replication functionality, enabling the company to add new systems in the future with which to efficiently replicate data between two different sites and therefore guard against failures at the primary site. The ESVA E60 offers this remote replication functionality to meet Huffy’s disaster recovery requirements.

High Performance Levels

With eight 1GbE iSCSI ports in a dual-controller configuration and support for high-performance disk drives, the ESVA E60 offers performance levels that meet Huffy’s current requirements. If Huffy’s performance requirements increase in the future, ESVA’s scale-out technology can help the company to linearly scale performance by adding new ESVA systems to an existing storage pool.

Easy Management

The consolidated storage offered by the ESVA E60 can be easily managed through Infortrend’s SANWatch management interface. With clear graphs and an easy-to-understand structure, all ESVA functions can be configured with only a few clicks in the SANWatch interface, including remote replication.