Posting on behalf of Maryna Frolova, Dell Storage Communications.
When you run a 24/7 operation for a luxury jet service, an IT outage is something you can’t afford.
The Flight Options IT team was finding that its legacy EMC storage system was running out of capacity. To keep up with data growth, the IT team started looking into different systems that would scale alongside its business, increase performance and reduce physical footprint and management time–until an unexpected disaster accelerated their decision making timeline. On Sept. 22, 2009, the Flight Options IT team discovered that a leaking air conditioner left its four-cabinet rack of database and applications servers and storage under water. The team needed to react quickly to protect its business systems. The backup data center worked as expected and the data was recovered. The next logical step was to get new equipment into the data center, quickly.
The Flight Options IT team spoke with EMC (the legacy vendor) and Dell Compellent about getting a new system quickly. The Compellent team was able to be agile, deliver the right product and act quickly. In less than a day, a Compellent system was ordered, shipped, installed and running. David Davies, CIO of Flight Options, said that in his long tenure as an IT professional he has never seen something like this done at such a rapid pace. It was a storage miracle.
As Flight Options deployed the new SAN, the company reaped the benefits of leveraging an efficient storage architecture to reduce the physical data center footprint by 80 percent, virtualize all applications, reduce costs, improve performance and cut management time to 15 minutes per week. To learn a bit more about the Flight Options story, check out the press release. David Davies is a great speaker who captivated an audience by presenting his story at SNW Spring in Santa Clara, CA. It’s not every day that you get to hear a story like David’s. He even joked that the marketing folks, like me, will love his story when we heard it for the first time.
Has your data center ever been stuck by an air conditioning disaster? What about any natural disasters? How did you recover? Please leave us a comment and tell us about it.