Resilient and scalable storage is key to running an always-on internet facing platform.
The Bunker can solution a dedicated single array or a clustered array based on your requirements. We connect it to your platform on-site at The Bunker, and then manage the day to day admin, maintenance and part replacements over the lifetime of the Storage Area Network (SAN). A dedicated SAN is the best way to ensure consistent latency and throughput to your platform, for workloads that require it.
Alternatively if you need storage on-tap, with set minimum latency and throughput tiers, we can offer dedicated volumes from our enterprise SAN cluster over IP, on 10Gb uplinks. Network connections to our shared SAN are secured at layer 2 and layer 3.
Setting up and maintaining a Storage Area Network (SAN) array can be a daunting task, and one that many cloud based customers would rather not have to deal with. An incorrect configuration or misunderstanding when performing tasks on volumes could mean poor performance or, at worst, data loss.
Our engineers can ensure you are presented with a SAN array with optimised multi-pathing and redundancy built-in, meaning if there is a disk, switch or network card fault, your data stays online while replacement parts are fitted. Also, at a time agreed with you we can perform regular maintenance such as disk and controller firmware upgrades, and add additional capacity.
Our shared enterprise SAN array makes it simple to add storage to your platform without the up-front hardware costs or extra rack space units, and is simply presented to your platform on a secure network link across a 10Gb connection. We can offer multiple tiers to suit your capacity and performance requirements, and can also migrate your data between tiers as your business requirements change.
The Bunker engineers have experience with a wide range of SANs from different vendors, including Dell, IBM, NetApp, HPe and Nimble. We are familiar with the best practice configurations that each vendor recommends when connecting to VMware, Microsoft Windows, Linux and Hyper-V endpoints, and our engineers have many years of experience setting up SAN storage arrays to ensure everything fits together correctly and is optimised for each host and network. We also ensure everything in-line to the storage is approved, such as switches, network cards, drivers, firmware and cabling.
Our SAN arrays are monitored 24/7/365 in case of a fault or service warning, including RAID disk failures. Our service desk can be contacted 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and can coordinate directly with our VMware, Microsoft, Open Source and Network engineers.
On a pre-agreed schedule we will perform hardware and software maintenance on your SAN array in order to keep it in top shape and within vendor support, as well as free from known security vulnerabilities.
In respect to a dedicated SAN array, a typical infrastructure example would contain the following:
1. One or more SAN array units configured as a single logical array.
2. Dual SAN controllers, each with 2x 10Gb SFP+ uplinks.
3. Two dedicated iSCSI 10Gb switches.
4. Local monitoring server (if not already available on your platform).
5. Local network connectivity to your hosts in your rack.
Dedicated storage is presented in block mode to each host, where it can then be formatted to whatever file system required.
For connectivity to our enterprise shared SAN array, we require the customer platform to have 2x 10Gb switches already or these will be added to facilitate the uplink to the central array. We can present shared array storage as block or file mode (such as NFS, SMB).
