simon ragg 1-2-1 Insight Investment
Market leading asset management company Insight Investment needed a more efficient, reliable IT infrastructure to allow the company to continue its period of successful growth. By virtualising its existing systems behind the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform® V with Hitachi software, the company has created an easy-to-manage, highly visible storage environment with unexpected performance
benefits.The new Hitachi storage solution has reinvigorated Insight’s IT infrastructure, providing plenty of capacity for the company’s continued growth along with significant performance improvements. Across the board, performance has increased by a third, with three hour batch processing tasks completed in two
hours.The company’s data management has also been improved by the thin provisioning capabilities of the Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software. Its ability to efficiently partition capacity as and when needed means that multiple applications and databases can be run on the storage system efficiently. Use of the virtualized Universal Storage Platform V environment has resulted in greater visibility of Insight’s data and resulted in a simple to manage system.
• Pure Storage – which bills itself as all SSD arrays, but cheaper than spinning disk. Its claim is qualified by the fact that its
operating environment deduplicates almost any byte that ever passes through the array. A bold claim which may raise many an eyebrow but it is packed full of Samsung SSD, the Korean giant being one of its investors, which may make things more interesting
• Whiptail – another new solid state player which distinguishes itself through its use of multi-level cell (MLC) memory. Whilst
MLC is often associated with cheaper solid state memory Whiptail say they have found a way to speed up MLC to match its rivals and extend its life with clever wear-levelling algorithms
• Tintri – has an appliance designed to support virtual servers combined with simple administration. Its products blend SSD
and spinning disk and are tuned to run virtual machines awfully fast without some of the usual SAN/server bottlenecks
We have actively engaged with all of these start-ups including many others such as Pivot 3, who have good technology and hard driving management but who knows how long it will be before any of these get gobbled up by the majors!
Q And how are the relationships with some of your more established partner vendors developing to meet end user
demands for doing more with less?
A As we have witnessed the great storage company growth boom ended with a series of big bang acquisitions with the likes of
Data Domain, Compellent, Isilon and more recently BlueArc having all been gobbled up by major players over the past year. These acquisitions have only strengthened our relationships with the more established partners and provided those vendors with more products in their portfolio that can meet the end users demand for doing more with less. I’m sure we’ve not seen the last of the action yet!
Q Can you share brief examples of the business benefits you’ve been able to deliver to customers in recent months?
A We have recently designed and deployed a 1000+ seat VDI environment around SSD for a major financial services customer.
This enabled us to displace nearly 200 traditional disk drives with only 18 SSD drives which provided for 100% overprovision on performance. It has saved the end user more than 17.5kw of instantaneous load power, more than 40U rack space and reduced login times by 95%.
Q The Cloud seems to dominate an IT conversation right now. What is S3’s role in helping end users come to grips with this business
enabler?
A The traditional method of using infrastructures, operating systems and software applications on more expensive desktop
PC’s, servers, networks or storage physically located in a building is being challenged by the rise of computing in the ‘cloud’. Large business organisations have been using the cloud for many years but it is only now beginning to be made widely available for the masses. At S3 we can help end users consider each element of the cloud proposition to define what if any parts are applicable to them and their business operations, such as:
• Cloud infrastructures – servers, network and related hardware held in data centres worldwide
• Cloud platforms – the infrastructure applications and operating platforms
• Cloud applications – whether to manage its own software using the data centre or use available free or paid for applications
In addition, other considerations include – bandwidth provision, data integrity and security, access, control, scalability, costs and end user skills.
Q And as the focus turns to managed services, how do you see S3 evolving to meet this demand?
A We have been providing services to customers for over 20 years – managed services is just a logical extension to this.
Rather than simply providing labour we can now provide full 20
www.snseurope.info I October/November 2011
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