A highly available storage infrastructure with no service interruptions

The customer was operating an aging virtualization and storage infrastructure, with equipment that was nearing the end of its support lifecycle. Replacing it had become essential to ensure the long-term performance, reliability, and security of its IT environment.

Since the company operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year, service continuity was a key requirement. The new infrastructure therefore had to be deployed and brought online without interrupting operations.

The customer was looking for a reliable, high-performance, and scalable storage solution capable of meeting several key requirements:

• Ensure full redundancy using two storage systems located in two data centers.
• Replicate data synchronously between the two sites.
• Provide ESXi VMware s with a single, always-available storage space.
• Ensure automatic failover in the event of a storage system or network link failure, without manual intervention.
• Enable the migration data migration from the old infrastructure without any service disruption.
• Perform maintenance tasks without affecting virtualized environments.
• The ability to increase storage capacity without affecting ESXi hosts.

We have deployed a Dell Technologies infrastructure based on two Dell PowerStore storage systems, installed in two separate data centers.

Both systems were configured with the Metro Volume feature, ensuring synchronous replication and active-active data availability between sites. Here is the diagram:

Replication between the two data centers is provided by a 40 Gbit/s LAN . Two Dell Connectrix Fibre Channel switches have also been deployed in each datacenter. They form two independent fabrics to which the ESXi hosts and PowerStore systems are connected, ensuring redundancy across all storage access paths.

A Witness server completes the architecture. Its role is to automatically arbitrate access to data in the event of a failure in a storage system or a connection between sites.

Finally, a Dell Secure Connect Gateway was installed to connect the infrastructure to the support services at Dell Technologies. It enables proactive monitoring and facilitates the detection and resolution of any incidents.

A migration conducted without interruption

 The new solution was deployed alongside the existing infrastructure. This approach made it possible to gradually migrate all virtual machines to the new storage systems without any service interruptions or impact on users.

Detailed project planning, combined with rigorous execution and excellent collaboration with Dell Technologies, made it possible to meet the client's particularly demanding requirements.

The customer now has access to a storage infrastructure:

• highly available and resilient;
• high-performance and designed for continuous operation;
• scalable, with the ability to add capacity without interruption;
• can be maintained without affecting the ESXi environments;
• proactively monitored by Dell Technologies support.

Upon completion of the project, a skills transfer was carried out to enable the client’s teams to manage the solution easily and independently.

This new infrastructure now ensures the continuity of the customer's critical operations, while providing the performance and flexibility needed to support its future needs.