Storage Modernization Boosts Productivity, Reduces Energy Consumption for South African ICT Provider Gijima

A South African ICT company refreshed its storage infrastructure to gain faster performance, better management, and scalable access and payment capabilities. With Hitachi Vantara, Gijima deployed a solution that not only met its needs but also substantially reduced its energy costs and carbon footprint.

  • October 16, 2023 | Author: Susan Biagi
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A leading IT service provider, Gijima provides cloud infrastructure, IT and outsourcing services to more than 1,000 enterprise clients and small to medium business clients. The Black-owned company has earned Level 1 AAA+ B-BBEE status and employs 3,000 people across 16 regions in South Africa.

Gijima acquired and operates a Tier 3 data center that hosts business-critical systems for its clients. The company needed to update its storage equipment to improve performance, management and efficiency. Gijima sought a storage system that offered a flexible commercial model, so clients could scale as needed, and one that would enable data migration without disrupting client services. Mindful of its environmental impact, Gijima knew that efficiency gains would help the company and its clients meet their sustainability goals.

Storage That Does More with Less

Gijima installed the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5100 and VSP 5500 at its production data center and VSP G700 arrays for disaster recovery. The VSP platforms are all-flash storage systems and require substantially less space than the previous spinning-disk arrays. That enabled Gijima to use only three racks, rather than nine, in the production data center and eliminated two racks at the disaster recovery center.

Data was migrated within four months. Using Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System RF and Hitachi TrueCopy Remote Replication software, Gijima was able to migrate client data to the new arrays with little or no downtime for most clients.

The team also upgraded the storage management software. Gijima implemented Hitachi Ops Center Administrator for storage management and provisioning, Analyzer to enable reporting and analytics, and Protector to handle data protection and replication management. In the future, Gijima can use Hitachi Ops Center Automater to streamline and simplify complex provisioning and other storage-related processes.

Improved Performance and Sustainable Benefits

With the new storage infrastructure, Gijima has seen marked performance benefits. On the mainframe side, batch processes execute more quickly. In the open systems environment, application response times have fallen into sub-millisecond levels, improving user satisfaction.

The VSPs enable such drastic data compression that Gijima has reduced its overall data landscape by about 25 percent. EverFlex allows Gijima to pay only for the storage capacity it uses and includes the replication and management software.

Gijima is also seeing staff gains from storage management. With more simplified reporting and easy-to-manage replication and backup capabilities, the team can easily access storage analytics. In addition, the new infrastructure takes up less physical space and requires less power and cooling, resulting in a 66 reduction in energy consumption. The energy-efficient solution has not only improved performance, it also saves money and helps Gijima and its clients lower their carbon footprint.

Find out more about Hitachi Vantara’s storage platforms.

Delve into the Hitachi Ops Center software.

Discover more about Hitachi Vantara’s sustainability efforts. 

 

 

Image Credit: Hitachi Vantara

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