Ensuring the availability of critical communications across Estonia

Overview

Challenge

• Supporting the delivery of critical services with a resilient, flexible storage infrastructure.

Solution

• Deployed new all-flash storage arrays with performance and scalability to cope with 20% annual data growth.    

Outcome

• Ensured the availability of critical customer services, enabling 3x improvement in energy efficiency and saving valuable rack space.

Challenge

Infrastructure Modernization to Support Quickly Evolving Needs

With around 660,000 private and business customers, Elisa Eesti is one of the largest telecommunications providers in Estonia. Part of the Finnish Elisa Oyj group, the company offers a growing range of services, including internet, fixed-line and mobile telephony, 4G networks, TV and digital streaming packages.

“Within Estonia, we are considered a life-critical service provider, as many commercial and public organizations depend on our solutions,” Kaur Lillepõld, IT Infrastructure Team Lead, Elisa Eesti, explains. “That means we need the highest levels of resilience in our IT infrastructure. If our services were impacted by downtime, it would hit the news headlines and undermine trust among our customers.”

To provide the stability and performance its IT environment needs, Elisa Eesti has relied on Hitachi Vantara block storage for many years. Until recently, the company used a combination of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G200 hybrid and VSP F350 flash arrays to support its mission-critical, operational and administrative applications. However, pressure on the storage environment was growing all the time.

“As we develop and launch new customer services, our application workloads are becoming more and more demanding,” adds Lillepõld. “Our overall data volumes are also growing by between 10 and 20% every year, and our storage infrastructure must be able to accommodate that trend.”

With their VSP G200 arrays fast approaching the end of their support life, Elisa Eesti started to plan a refresh of the storage environment. “Although the performance of the Hitachi VSP G200 systems was still excellent, it’s essential that we have an up-to-date infrastructure, with full support available. We also wanted to use the refresh project to improve the scalability, efficiency and sustainability of our environment,” notes Lillepõld.

Solution

Partnering for Rapid Implementation While Minimizing Risk

To help modernize its infrastructure, Elisa Eesti consulted long-term support partner Proact Estonia. Working together, they looked for a platform that would provide the flexibility to handle data growth over the next five to seven years. After assessing potential options, Elisa Eesti selected two Hitachi VSP E790 arrays, and worked with Proact to deploy the systems and migrate workloads from the previous systems.

“We had two key objectives during the implementation. Minimize the impact on internal users and customers, and complete the project quickly,” explains Lillepõld. “Overall, it was a fairly straightforward process. Whenever we encountered challenges, we just stepped back and adjusted our approach to find a way forward. In the end, we hit our targets and made the switch without any interruption to our services.”

Today, Elisa Eesti has an all-flash storage environment based on Hitachi VSP E790 and VSP F350 arrays. The company uses their global-active device (GAD) functionality to support an active-active architecture, with data replicated synchronously between the arrays in two data centers. In the event of failure at one location, Elisa Eesti can simply failover to the second site to maintain business continuity.

“Using GAD gives me confidence that we have strong measures in place against potential incidents,” Lillepõld continues. “Nothing is ever certain in IT, and we are always working hard to make improvements across our infrastructure, but the Hitachi solutions provide a high level of resilience.”

In addition, Elisa Eesti uses Hitachi Ops Center Administrator and Ops Center Analyzer for provisioning, capacity management, performance analysis and other management tasks. As well as Ops Center Protector to manage monthly, weekly, daily and sometimes even hourly data snapshots, providing an extra layer of protection against the risk of data breaches and other unexpected issues.

“Being able to use a Hitachi made solution to manage our Hitachi VSP systems is a match made in heaven, and helps keep things simple,” adds Lillepõld. “Our team really likes using Ops Center, and the interface is very intuitive and logical. We now plan to automate storage management tasks to unlock valuable time savings.”

Outcome

Improved Performance, Reliability, Energy Efficiency and More

The deployment of the Hitachi VSP E790 arrays is the latest successful chapter in the collaboration between Elisa Eesti, Proact and Hitachi Vantara. The new storage systems have hit all the company’s requirements for high performance, resilience, efficiency and scalability, and are helping to mitigate the risk of downtime.

“In Estonia, we have a highly positive perception about the quality of Japanese products, and Hitachi Vantara storage shows why,” explains Lillepõld. “Our Hitachi VSP E790 arrays provide the high performance and reliability that we need as a nationally important service provider to keep our solutions running round-the-clock. In fact, we’ve achieved 100% data availability with the latest Hitachi solutions.”

Furthermore, the switch to the compact 2U Hitachi VSP E790 systems has generated useful rack space savings in the data centers. Currently, Elisa Eesti is also upgrading its server environment, and the extra space now available will enable the deployment of additional compute resources to support new customer services.

By moving to the latest generation of Hitachi Vantara storage, Elisa Eesti has also significantly reduced its power consumption, as Lillepõld explains. “With the Hitachi VSP E790 arrays, we have achieved a threefold improvement in energy efficiency. As energy prices are so high at the moment, cutting our consumption is a huge benefit. It will also help us reduce our carbon footprint and operate more sustainably, which is another key objective.”

He concludes: “Our collaboration with Proact and Hitachi Vantara goes from strength to strength. Having a local support partner available is so important, and Proact always delivers. They offer real infrastructure expertise, and helped us to select, deploy and get the most value from our new Hitachi Vantara storage arrays. We are now well-placed to provide high-quality, dependable services to our many customers.”

Proact

Proact is Europe’s leading specialist in data and information management, with a focus on cloud services and data center solutions. Founded in Sweden in 1994, Proact helps customers to store, connect, protect, secure and drive value from their data, while increasing agility, productivity, and efficiency. Proact operates in Sweden, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Norway, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA.