Every geographical region has its environmental challenges, and businesses with mission-critical data must be prepared for natural disasters. A banking group with multiple locations in the Great Plains region of the U.S., known as “Tornado Alley,” had avoided any critical damage. Still, the group wanted to update its data center infrastructure to ensure the integrity of its critical banking systems and guarantee round-the-clock operations in case of disaster.
As a long-time Hitachi Vantara customer, the banking group had maintained a reliable, Hitachi Vantara data infrastructure but suffered a brief outage in 2017, when the main data center was hit by a tornado. Fortunately, the storage arrays were only offline for a few hours, but the experience spurred the bank to strengthen its infrastructure.
Working with Hitachi Vantara, the bank installed additional equipment at a colocation facility near the primary site. They also implemented a three-tier data center architecture, relying on Hitachi Vantara’s global-active devicetechnology to create and maintain synchronous, remote copies of data volumes to provide immediate failover capabilities in case of disaster.
Hitachi EverFlex Offers Scalability on Demand
That data resiliency strategy was sufficient for several years, but eventually the bank needed to modernize its storage network. Some equipment was more than eight years old, and in some cases, data was being stored on legacy spinning disks. The bank wanted to upgrade to utilize Hitachi Vantara’s high-performance NVMe drives and the latest adaptive data reduction (ADR) technology.
The bank previously leased its Hitachi Vantara storage infrastructure, benefitting from predictable monthly costs and regular technology upgrades. This time, the bank opted to upgrade using Hitachi EverFlex, with a flexible Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) delivery model that allows the bank to scale capacity as demand and business needs change.
The team upgraded to Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5600 systems. Utilizing Hitachi Vantara’s ADR technology and data reduction capabilities, the bank achieved 4:1 compression and deduplication rates in key applications, boosting efficiency.
Scaling for the Storm—and Slashing Costs
The modern data infrastructure offers greater capacity and performance, while reducing data center space needs and cutting energy costs by 29 percent. Taking advantage of EverFlex has saved the bank an additional $18,000 per month on leasing costs. In fact, despite adding a third data center in the last project and upgrading to the VSP 5600s this time, the bank’s overall costs declined.
Even more important to the bank is the fail-safe reliability of the new Hitachi Vantara equipment and the three data center infrastructure. Hitachi has kept its promise of 100 percent data availability guarantee. A decade later, even as data volumes have soared into the petabytes, the new storage architecture has not incurred a serious hardware outage, nor has the bank lost data from any Hitachi array.
Find out more about Hitachi EverFlex.
Image credit: Hitachi Vantara