Openet is the first company in Western Australia to deploy the Hewlett Packard Left Hand Networks 4300 Storage Area Network.

The storage area network (SAN), deployed as part of a server refresh and consolidation project for a client in the mining sector, provides centralised, network-attached storage for both server operating systems and data.

The total solution consisting of VMware vSphere, running on HP blade servers in a C3000 blade centre, with all storage on the SAN delivers an easily managed, fault-tolerant solution that meets the client's current needs while ensuring that future expansion can be accommodated.

Data on the SAN is accessed via the iSCSI protocol with some portions of the storage mapped at the VMware layer and others mapped at the Windows Server layer.

In deploying the solution, Openet invested significant time in performance testing to determine the best balance of performance and fault tolerance for different storage requirements.

"Operating systems, general data and transaction logging have different disk access requirements. This is well understood on traditional physical server deployments however a general lack of specific information lead us to perform thorough and systematic testing on this storage platform to ensure we achieved maximum performance for our client. We are very happy with the results." said Andrew Monteiro, Openet's Managing Director.