Fiona O Keeffe
Customer Advocacy Program Manager
August 06, 2024
At first glance, it may have sounded overly ambitious. The goal was to modernize storage infrastructure to A) achieve 100% data availability, B) accommodate 20% YoY growth AND C) increase energy efficiency three-fold. But for innovative Estonian telecom provider, Elisa Eesti, working with Hitachi Vantara and partner Proact Estonia, it was more like just another day at the office. And an example of the kind of progressive thinking that has made Elisa one of Estonia’s largest, fastest growing providers.
The new environment, based-on Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), supports Elisa Eesti’s mission-critical operational and administrative apps. “Our Hitachi VSP arrays provide the high performance and reliability that we need as a nationally important service provider to keep our solutions running round-the-clock,” said Elisa Eesti IT Infrastructure Team Lead, Kaur Lillepõld.
With 660,000 private and business customers relying on its services, Elisa Eesti is considered a critical service provider. Meaning they need to ensure the highest levels of resilience possible.
Reducing Power Consumption and Increasing Reliability
In addition to safeguarding data availability, the new Hitachi environment also helps reduce power consumption. “We have achieved a threefold improvement in energy efficiency,” confirmed Lillepõld. “As energy prices are so high now, cutting our consumption is a huge benefit. It will also help us reduce our carbon footprint and operate more sustainably, which is a key objective.”
Elisa Eesti now has an all-flash storage environment, including Hitachi VSP E790 arrays. The company uses 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 said. “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.”
Collaborating for Success
The migration to the new storage infrastructure was completed in Q3 2024 in partnership with Proact Estonia. “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,” commented Lillepõld. “They offer real infrastructure expertise, and helped us to select, deploy and get the most value from our new Hitachi Vantara storage arrays.”
Founded in 1994, with offices across Europe and the U.S., Proact is a leading specialist in data and information management, with a focus on cloud services and data center solutions. "Proact and Elisa have been cooperating on different IT areas for many years. Elisa has an excellent team and very high requirements for solutions quality and performance. Thus, we are happy to work with Hitachi, which designs and produces products which meet and exceed these requirements,” said Karel Kannel, managing director of Proact Estonia.
Since the new Hitachi storage infrastructure was deployed, Elisa Eesti has achieved 100% data availability, which helps ensure continuous service delivery across Estonia. The company also has the scalability to support its plans for growth. “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.”
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As a Customer Advocacy Program Manager, Fiona’s goal is to showcase customer innovation and success with Hitachi Vantara's products and services and to support key business strategies through impactful customer programs. She’s a graduate of University College Dublin and is based in Dublin, Ireland.
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