저장 장치 확장 요건을 충족하기 위해 Infortrend의 ESVA 저장 솔루션을 채택한 Force1 India

저장 장치 확장 요건을 충족하기 위해 Infortrend의 ESVA 저장 솔루션을 채택한 Force1 India

Force India, known throughout the world for their success in Formula One racing, was formed in 2007. Based in the UK at Silverstone, Force India is engaged in the design, manufacture and racing of Formula One cars and has 300 employees located across two fixed sites and one mobile site (the racing team itself). The team’s success continues to grow season by season.

The team’s design and racing operations require a highly reliable and flexible IT infrastructure to ensure that the data they generate is always highly available to their users, and can be edited, stored and retrieved very quickly and with maximum reliability. Therefore, the choice of the correct data storage systems is an essential part of ensuring the success of this infrastructure. The storage systems originally used were no longer able to continue to meet the growing demands and needs of the expanding Force India team. Hence, the team started to search for an additional storage system that would be able to meet their immediate, mid-term and long-term data storage requirements. After a very careful assessment, Force India selected Infortrend’s ESVA (Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture) F20 storage solution. The ESVA F20 met all of Force India’s key requisites, which included future expansion capabilities, ease of management, and high performance levels.

The Challenges: Accommodating Massive Data Growth, Providing High Performance Whilst Ensuring 24x7 Operations

In an environment as competitive and complex as Formula One racing, the amounts of data processed and stored can be immense. For Force India, the main applications for which it requires storage systems include computer-aided design (CAD) and race telemetry data. The difference between winning and losing in Formula One is often a matter of milliseconds, and therefore every improvement that can be achieved, in both the design of the car or by tracking the car’s performance during testing and racing is essential.

Force India was experiencing massive data growth, and all the data generated by the aforementioned applications needed to be properly stored. The legacy storage solution used by Force India had limited expansion options and the performance levels were also no longer meeting their demands. The team therefore began to look for a new storage solution. Key features that the new systems needed to possess included easy expansion capabilities, simple management and high performance levels. Furthermore, the team needed to ensure that all IT resources were available 24x7 to support all of their operations. However, in its search for a new solution the team needed to keep within the available budget, which was also a factor in the overall selection process.

The Solution and Its Benefits: Infortrend’s ESVA F20 Offers Excellent Performance and Expansion Capabilities

After a careful selection process, the team decided to adopt Infortrend’s ESVA F20 storage system combined with an ESVA J20 expansion enclosure. These Infortrend systems are able to support Force India’s powerful SAN, and offer large storage capacity and excellent reliability. All of the ESVA systems and expansion enclosures can be managed by a single management interface. In addition to the ESVA product features that strongly appealed to the Force India team, they were all available within the overall budget that needed to be met.

ESVA Expansion Enclosures Can Be Easily Added and Help to Accommodate Future Data Growth

Besides the ESVA F20 storage array, Force India also chose to purchase an ESVA J20 expansion enclosure. Expansion enclosures are easily added to the main storage system through simple expansion links without any downtime. The main storage system and expansion enclosure can be managed by Infortrend’s SANWatch management software, allowing Force India’s IT administrators to manage the complete storage configuration through a single interface. Currently, Force India has stored 20TB of data on Infortrend’s storage systems. With flexible drive support, the ESVA F20 and J20 combined can provide a maximum storage capacity of 64TB, allowing for significant future data growth without replacing or adding new systems.

High Data Availability Ensures 24x7 Operations

Force India requires that its IT resources are available 24x7 to support all of the team's operations. The ESVA F20 meets this requirement with a number of advanced features. The ESVA F20 comes with storage-based replication capabilities. Space-efficient snapshots can serve as granular recovery points based on which files can be restored and data can be rolled back. Full data copies created within or across storage pool(s) can be readily leveraged by host applications to resume production when the original data is corrupted. With these features, the Force India team is able to obtain the highest data availability with a minimum of service downtime in case the storage is damaged by logical errors, physical errors or disasters.

Simple Management Increases Efficiency

The SANWatch management software that comes with the ESVA system provides an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, allowing for centralized management of the ESVA array and the expansion enclosure. RAID level configuration, capacity allocation and data protection can be completed in a few simple clicks. This enables Force India to save time spent on managing the systems, and increases the efficiency of the team’s IT operations.

Advanced Product Design Meets Performance Demand

The ESVA offers all the performance benefits of storage virtualization. Features such as automatic load balancing technology and thin provisioning ensure the most efficient utilization of pooled storage capacity and bandwidth. Featuring the latest 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host connectivity and superior bandwidth, the ESVA F20 is able to support Force India’s powerful SAN. The advanced product design enables the ESVA F20 to meet the performance requirements of Force India.