Waterschap Aa en Maas
Consolidation/Simplification and Availability
When the Aa and the Maaskant Water Boards merged into the Aa and Maas Water Board, various IT infrastructures had to be combined. To be sure, immediately after the merger the server park was modernized, but a solution had to be found for the complexity connected with a DAS environment. By creating a central storage pool with Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage and McDATA Spereon Switches, the Water Board made sure that critical data are continuously available for smooth and trouble-free water management.
Public water systems supply the essential source of safe, clean water. Data storage systems provide a similar necessity for the IT infrastructure: safe, accessible information, making sure that an organization’s activities continue uninterrupted. For the newly formed Aa and Maas Water Board, located in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, this is essential for an uninterrupted business process. As a result of the merger of two Water Boards, the Aa and Maas Water Board now has 9 local facilities, almost 500 employees, and about 4TB business-critical data. The Aa and Maas Water Board manages 110 kilometers of dikes along the Maas River.
These dikes meet strict standards and protect the Aa and Maas area against high water in the Maas River. In addition, the Water Board is responsible for the purification of wastewater from nearly 700,000 people and thousands of businesses. Finally, the Aa and Maas Water Board provides sufficient water in streams, canals, and ditches. This is done with dams and pumping stations and the right arrangement of watercourses.
Merger Turning Point for Change
The merger of the Aa and the Maaskant Water Boards meant a big challenge for the 12 employees in the ICT Department. The two IT infrastructures had to be combined and the Water Boards had to create a plan for the organization of a new server and storage environment. The server environment was renewed immediately after the merger, and a year later the storage question was tackled. For a large number of Water Board activities, it is necessary that the data be continuously accessible. For instance, when toxic substances enter surface water, it must be quickly determined what the consequences are for the water system. If data is stored on various direct-attached storage (DAS) servers in various locations, the possibility of immediate access to the necessary information is limited.
A central location for data storage remedies this problem. Ton Ruisendaal, ICT Manager for the Aa and Maas Water Board explained, “Because of the ever stricter regulations for environmental and water management, more and more data has to be stored that must be available at all times. The storage environment is therefore an essential part of our organization.”
ICT Department Tackles a Large Number of Problems
It was important for Ton Ruisendaal to bring local data together in a central storage pool to create greater flexibility and scalability and to ensure that critical data is continuously available. He created a plan to bring this about with the implementation of a storage area network (SAN). The Water Board utilized 186 applications for the performance of its daily activities. Because the DAS servers were scattered over various locations, IT management and maintenance were difficult and time-consuming and it was not possible for the Water Board to make optimal use of the storage capacity of the entire organization.
Moreover, backups on tape require personnel for such tasks as retrieving and restoring data. In addition, an effort was made to lower management costs by addressing time-consuming management activities that didn't get enough attention. A consultant was brought in to help the ICT Department with the formulation of a comprehensive package of storage demands. Six storage solution providers submitted proposals. The ICT team reduced the number of choices to two potential candidates. “There were two deciding factors for why we chose Hitachi Data Systems,” said Arian de Bekker, IT management coordinator for the Water Board. “First of all, the Hitachi Data Systems solution offered a better price to quality ratio. In addition, we were impressed with the demo and the involvement of Hitachi Data Systems and its partner i³ solutions in the development of concrete implementation and service plans.”
Arian de Bekker - IT Management Coordinator
Aa and Maas Water Board
"We were impressed by the Hitachi demo and the involvement of Hitachi Data Systems and its partner i³ solutions in the development of concrete implementation and service plans.”
Hitachi Storage Offers Endless Flexibility
The Aa and Maas Water Board's ICT Department chose the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage model AMS500 as the basis for its new SAN strategy. The implementation of the new storage environment was without problems and according to schedule. One of the nine District locations now acts as the main data center. In the SAN a connection is made to the AMS500 through McDATA Sphereon 4700 Fabric Switches and VMware software takes care of the link to virtual servers. Within one month, all Water Board data was migrated through the SAN from servers to the AMS500, where at this time the data takes up 40 percent of the 10TB storage capacity. “We increased the SAN more rapidly than expected. It is fairly easy to add virtual servers without a problem. We now have 65 servers in total, 12 of which are virtual servers,” said Ruisendaal.
The AMS500 is configured as RAID-6 storage with two backup disks, increasing the reliability of the system. Thanks to the clever combination of Fibre Channel and SATA, the IT Department is capable of handling practically any requirement for advanced, cost-effective disk storage. The Hitachi HiCommand® Dynamic Link Manager software takes care of failover, failback, and load balancing and, if necessary, switches the I/O automatically to an alternative path for active data movement, making data availability continuous.
For visual supervision of the storage sources, the Aa and Maas Water Board uses Hitachi Device Manager software to visualize and precisely manage the storage sources constantly. This is in combination with HiCommand Replication Monitor software to be able to display volume replication configurations and snapshots. For rapid data restoration without limiting service levels or production processing, the ShadowImage In-System Replication software bundle provides data copies of multiple volumes, which can be used for system backups, testing applications, or other activities.
Advantages of SAN Operational Activities
With an advanced SAN, the Aa and Maas Water Board has brought the necessary flexibility, scalability, and availability under its roof. Now employees have access to their data from each of the nine locations at any moment. “The information at the Water Board is now always available, which is extremely important for the performance of business-critical processes that demand 100 percent uptime,” Ruisendaal said. With the central storage management of the Hitachi SAN, the ICT team has succeeded in limiting the time for and the complexity of the management tasks and at the same time in increasing the value of ICT for the company.
In addition, the ICT employees can do their work during office hours without the end users experiencing failure or temporary inaccessibility of the system. “The AMS500 offers us much flexibility: If the disk capacity is insufficient, we simply prepare a LUN (logical unit number). We can now retrieve various versions of a file from a disk, which poses much less difficulty than retrieving the file from a tape. And the system is completely scalable, without our having to replace controllers or switches,” said Arian de Bekker. “I think we can go forward with this for a great many years."
