Business continuity is an essential measure for the productivity of a company, which cannot be neglected. In fact, no one can afford to block operations; on the contrary, it must take care to guarantee it through appropriate interventions. From this premise the
services for Business Continuity of 3CiME Technology for the Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute are developed: complete virtualization of storage SAN (Storage Area Network), based on
DataCore technology with 60 TB in high reliability, reinstallation and re-engineering of the
VMware virtual farm .
The
service for Business Continuity takes shape from 2011; after considering the available options, the decision was taken to adopt the
DataCore solution. Thus the purchase procedures were started, with the awards taking place at the beginning of 2012. The
DataCore solution was installed in May 2012 and the first migration was made in June.
The engine rooms are located in two separate buildings at a distance of 400 m, each with an electric power supply and separate UPS (as a hospital they are also equipped with generating sets that intervene in 10-15 seconds in the event of a blackout, to safeguard the
Business Continuity system).
The network was redundant with 2 star centers in the two engine rooms; all the peripheral network devices have a connection with both star centers, so as to always guarantee
Business Continuity.
Furthermore, a distributed SAN with two
DataCore San Simphony V nodes was created, one for each engine room. The SAN provides storage for the following servers, distributed over the two machine rooms and
I-SCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) connected:
- A cluster of two Oracle RAC nodes on IBM xseries servers and Oracle enterprise linux operating system.
- A cluster of three VMware 5.0 nodes, on IBM xseries hardware, on which 45 virtual machines are hosted.
The choice of hardware was made freely by the customer (who had expressly asked for "freedom of choice", and this is what they obtained) which, with the
DataCore solution, was able to bring down the chains of dependence on a hardware supplier, as well as ensuring the best
Business Continuity services.