Rakon has upgraded its storage area network to meet capacity demands associated with its recently-opened joint venture factory in China. The electronics company has replaced its two IBM DS4700 SANs with an IBM Storwize V7000 SAN.
IS infrastructure manager Paul Conroy says the old SAN was approaching the end of its warranty.
“We did some price comparisons with the likes of HP and Dell but we did want to stay with a single vendor,” he says.
“The IBM price was extremely competitive. We got the new SAN heavily discounted at $60,000. IBM was coming up to the end of their six-monthly financial period.”
Conroy expects the new SAN to serve the needs of Rakon for the next five to six years.
The company is a world leader in producing crystal oscillators for the telecommunications, GPS, defence and aeronautical industries. Manufactured by the tens of millions, every oscillator is tested before being shipped. The test data, along with the manufacturing, financial and other administrative records of Rakon’s global operations, is held in the SAN at its Auckland head office.
The increase in production when the new factory at Chengdu, in southwest China, came on-stream in July, put extra pressure on the head office IT systems, which include SAP and Microsoft’s CRM, as well as email systems.
Conroy says Rakon will upgrade to Microsoft’s CRM 2011 in the next few weeks.
The company also has operations in France, the UK, the US, and a joint venture in India.
The V7000 mid-range disc system has 450Gb hard drives and a data access speed boost of 60% to 100% over the DS4700 system it is replacing. The rack space is reduced by two thirds.