Storage Consolidation Project

TeraMach developed a storage and backup architecture for a government department with over 5,000 employees.  Its scope covered both national headquarters and regional offices. The architecture design addressed addressed availability, scalability and performance, taking into account expected I/O loads, virtualization, security and costs.  The design incorporated the pre-determined scalability and performance specifications, availability/reliability expectations, the management framework and also allowed the integration between the proposed storage and backup solution.

TeraMach:

• Used tiered storage to enhance performance levels, while reducing the cost of disk capacity
• Implemented industry best practices for tiered storage strategy
• Proposed backup and archival policies and procedures that would tie into the proposed tiered storage strategy
• Evaluated and designed storage and backup infrastructure solutions (hardware and software) covering:
  • Enterprise storage and backup architecture for NHQ and regions
  • Connectivity of the SAN network
  • Management framework tying the entire storage and backup environment
  • Identification of existing re-usable components and resources
• Developed backup and archival policies, procedures, and assessed impact on the proposed tiered storage strategy
• Identified architectural dependencies on performance, scalability and redundancy; and
• Assessed impact and risks for the new storage and backup infrastructure based on the existing challenges and new IT environments or projects (i.e. file service consolidation, hybrid architecture, etc.).

The Result:
The TeraMach team created an integrated enterprise storage and backup architecture that will act as a blueprint for the next five years.