Case Study: Fera achieves unified petabyte management, high availability and reduced hardware TCO with DataCore Software

Fera - Customer Case Study

Fera, a UK agri‑food research and analysis organisation, was struggling to manage petabytes of research data across a fragmented estate of Dell/HP/NetApp/IBM servers and hundreds of legacy DAS/NAS devices, which caused VM performance bottlenecks, downtime during maintenance and rising hardware/network TCO. To unify and future‑proof their environment, Fera selected DataCore Software and its software‑defined storage platform, SANsymphony‑V.

DataCore Software deployed SANsymphony‑V as an overlay across Fera’s two‑site metro cluster, consolidating legacy arrays, enabling live VM migration, thin provisioning, auto‑tiering of over 1 PB across four tiers and hourly CDP snapshots. The solution now protects 250 physical servers and supports 12 VMware vSphere hosts running 300 VMs, delivers assured high availability, reduced maintenance overhead and vendor independence, and has improved VMware performance by about 15%.

Fera

Ben Jones

Data Centre Manager