CSR Enhances IT Performance with NetApp

CSR (News - Alert), a designer of wireless devices, has greatly enhanced its IT performance, improved its disaster recovery capabilities, and consolidated its IT data center by moving all of its storage to NetApp platforms, with business applications on Data ONTAP 7G and critical chip design on NetApp Data ONTAP GX.

 

CSR enjoys a strong position in the wireless technology industry, and in order to maintain its position, the company needs an IT infrastructure that is able to keep pace. Their storage platform plays an integral role in CSR’s IT infrastructure success because it must be able to store and manage the company’'s intense flow of critical data while providing dependable and effective disaster recovery.

 

Before adopting NetApp platforms, CSR leveraged a mixed storage platform made up of systems from EMC (News - Alert), HP, and NetApp. David Mountford, vice president of Information Systems for CSR explained that with their high-performance Linux compute farm, they needed to identify a single storage platform that could work with them and scale to meet their ever-growing needs.

 

CSR also required impeccable disaster recovery capabilities given the time-to-market demands that they live with, noted Mountford. The company weighed its options and looked at all of the major storage vendors, before selecting NetApp Data ONTAP GX to provide the type of end-to-end solution that they needed to continue to grow their business.

 

CSR upgraded and expanded its current NetApp estate to a set of clustered storage systems and deployed two NetApp FAS3040 GX nodes and two NetApp FAS6070 GX nodes at each of its two Cambridge, UK sites. Leveraging the system, CSR successfully achieved higher I/Os per second to a single data volume that allowed them to spread data-intensive projects across multiple heads simultaneously. CSR was thus able to better scale its performance and capacity and able to support multiple simultaneous tape-outs while the previous architecture could support just one.

 

Mountford indicated that NetApp Data ONTAP GX not only gives them the ability to scale to meet increased demand, but also provides the flexibility to redistribute load across their cluster without any impact to the availability of the system.

 

CSR’s Data ONTAP GX cluster is spread across two sites, and thus they are able to safely and easily mirror critical data and make it available from either site. According to NetApp, the GX cluster remains available even under disaster conditions and is able to back up all of CSR’s engineering data in a third of the time previous solutions took.

 

NetApp further explains that moving to a single storage platform has provided CSR with a more streamlined and efficient storage infrastructure. CSR’s support team is now able to focus on a single storage platform and operating system, which provides a higher level of service to the business. The solution also allows CSR to work with one storage vendor for technical support and purchasing decisions.

 

Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing for NetApp, believes that CSR is a great example of how NetApp Data ONTAP GX can help customers shorten their development cycles and speed business results.

 

NetApp provides customers with a scale-out storage solution, enabling them to accelerate product time to market, and improve development efficiency.