Logicalis

Share access to common storage across mixed user Platforms

Company Profile

Formed in 1970, KeyMed has grown from a staff of four to become firmly established as an international leader in the manufacture and supply of specialised medical and industrial equipment. The company employs over 900 people at its purpose-built headquarters in Southend-on-Sea, its branch office in Scotland and subsidiaries in the USA, Ireland and Plymouth. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Olympus Optical Co Ltd., Japan, KeyMed is an important part of the global Olympus network, with specific responsibility for the development and manufacture of medical equipment and industrial products for distribution world-wide.

KeyMed has invested considerably in its manufacturing facilities at Southend and Plymouth. The company designs and manufactures products bearing the Olympus brand for export to over one hundred countries around the world. KeyMed's Industrial Division, ‘Olympus Industrial', has continued toexpand and is now responsible for the sales and marketing of the entire range of Olympus Remote Visual Inspection products worldwide

Customer's Business Issues

KeyMed has 15 discrete servers, each one running its own application. Attached to each server were a disk array and a tape drive, providing storage and backup for that particular server alone. There had been massive disk growth and this arrangement made it impossible to share storage space between servers and take advantage of any spare capacity. The centralised management of back up described "as a nightmare".

Customer's Business Objectives

KeyMed had a number of business objectives that they wanted to meet:

• Consolidate disk and tape storage across all servers into one Storage Area Network (SAN)
• Manage and control growth of storage
• Give management central view of storage usage
• Reduce costs of maintenance and management
• Maximise use of space in computer room
• Maximise resiliency of backup

Initial Customer Set up

Logicalis was one of four companies approached by KeyMed to tender for the reorganisation of the company's 1.5TB of storage. According to Richard Cherry, Head of Group Business Systems at KeyMed,

"We are a cash rich company so price was not the only consideration when we looked at the bids. We had to have a comfort factor that our partner in this project really knew what they were about and would be around in the future. We also wanted to use equipment and software from established vendors in this area."

The Logicalis Solution

• Logicalis designed, installed and implemented the complete
• Storage Area Network solution:

Hardware

• FastT500 and 700
• IBM pSeries and xSeries Servers
• IBM 2109 Fibre channel switches
• IBM 3583 Tape Library

Software

• Tivoli Storage Manager software (TSM)
• Domino, SQL Server, Oracle backup extensions for TSM

Services

• Design of solution
• Installation of disk, tape library, pSeries and xSeries
• Installation of Remote Mirroring
• Installation of TSM and DB extensions
• Project Management
• Implementation of solution

Ongoing Support

• Logicalis provided One Call ongoing support for hardware and software
• Pre agreed SLA to deliver rapid response and resolution

Customer Benefits

KeyMed have realised many key benefits from implementing this solution.

• Fully redundant and consolidated storage system – storage can be moved to wherever demand is needed
• Multiple platforms share disk
• Full data protection from remote disk mirroring and remote tape backup library
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
• Ongoing flexible support covering all aspects of system and consultancy
• Improved customer service and satisfaction
• Improved use of space in Computer Room with rack system

Why Logicalis?

According to Richard Cherry, "Logicalis came up with the best solution, using tried and tested equipment and techniques. The technical expertise of the team of three who worked with us was second to none and they carried out all the work themselves. The combination of IBM and Logicalis gave me a considerable comfort factor when recommending their solution to the Board. Since installation, I have certainly not been disappointed as Logicalis support has been excellent throughout."

Customer Business Issues

• Consolidate disk and tape storage across all servers into one Storage Area Network
• Manage and control growth of storage
• Give management central view of storage usage
• Reduce costs of maintenance and management
• Maximise use of space in computer room
• Maximise resiliency of backup

Benefits

• Fully redundant and consolidated storage system – storage can be moved to wherever demand is required
• Multiple platforms share disk
• Full data protection from remote disk mirroring and remote tape backup library
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
• Ongoing flexible support covering all aspects of system and consultancy
• Improved customer service and satisfaction
• Improved use of space in Computer Room with rack system

The Logicalis Solution

• FastT500 and 700
• IBM pSeries and xSeries Servers
• IBM 2109 Fibre channel switches
• IBM 3583 Tape Library
• Tivoli Storage Manager software (TSM)
• Domino, SQL Server, Oracle backup extensions for TSM
• Installation of disk, tape library, pSeries and xSeries
• Installation of Remote Mirroring
• Installation of TSM and DB extensions
• Ongoing One Call support for hardware and software

Partnerships

• IBM Premier Partner
• IBM TSSC