Client story Tech Company Realizes Global-Scale Performance Gains With Evergreen Storage
By Insight Editor / 17 Nov 2021 / Topics: Data center
Facts at a glance
Client industry
Technology solutions
Insight provided:
- Architectural oversight
- Evaluation of current storage ecosystem
- Strategic migration plan
- Technical project
- Pure as-a-Service storage solution
- Ongoing monitoring on usage
Insight services:
- Professional services
- Project management
Outcomes:
Download the client story
- 500TB of data successfully migrated in a staggard rollout
- High-performance flash storage providing consistent 2–4ms response time
- Projected uptime reliability of six 9s, or 99.9999%
- Reduced operational burden for upgrades, expansions, and monitoring
- Access to dedicated technical resources, expertise, project management and oversight
- Ability to add or remove capacity, upgrade software and components (including backplanes) without service impact
The client
As a technology provider specializing in legal and compliance functions, this global corporation serves more than 20 verticals across five continents — including some of the world’s largest enterprises.
The challenge: A companywide storage solution not meeting expectations
The client had been facing supportability, reliability and performance issues on an existing software-defined storage solution — issues that posed a threat to end-user satisfaction and could result in potential revenue loss. The client made a commitment to deploy a new solution, but the migration path away from its existing system was complex.
Timing was critical; the organization was facing an impending bill for its previous solution and needed to complete a full migration across all determined locations before being charged. This underscored the value of a new As a Service alternative: a true pay-per-use model would avoid lock-in, giving the client greater flexibility and predictability.
The solution: Evergreen, state-of-the-art data storage — rolled out across six data centers worldwide
The organization had chosen Pure, a Storage as a Service (STaaS) solution to replace its existing platform. With Pure as-a-Service™, the client gets a true utility storage service with enterprise features. Block, file and object storage can be consumed as a simple subscription in the data center, a service provider or in the public cloud.
With 500TB of data to support across the enterprise, the tech provider needed a way to migrate strategically — and with little disruption to the business.
“Laying the right groundwork is key for global-scale projects such as this one,” notes one of Insight’s senior architects. “We looked at everything from performance to capacity trends and required Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) within the existing storage platform. This helped define all considerations — we knew without a shadow of a doubt what needed to be present in the new solution.”
In addition, understanding the applications and related dependencies on the storage is critical for building an appropriate migration strategy. Our teams worked together to gather the appropriate data, defined the right resources, and developed a plan to migrate to the Pure as-a-Service solution armed with that unique knowledge.
After gathering initial requirements and data and developing a robust plan, Insight mobilized our project management resources and technical oversight to begin this widescale migration.
The benefits: Improved performance, reliability, and a future-forward approach to storage
With a staggered rollout across six data centers, the organization completed its 500TB migration guided by Insight’s project management, dedicated technical oversight and expertise across the Pure portfolio. Today, the company is enjoying a more reliable and performant experience with its new storage solution — without large upfront costs or the operational work of upgrades, expansions and monitoring.
Insight continues to monitor usage, helping the organization make strategic decisions on usage and thresholds, scaling up or down as needed. By shifting away from a provisioned capacity model, the company has eliminated the need to determine data reduction for each workload, never running out of capacity and never needing to reorder capacity. The ability to have capacity on demand whenever needed has drastically simplified the organization’s entire approach to data storage on the back end, while improving the customer experience on the front end.
