Magyar Telekom Accelerates Innovation and Energy Efficiencies with Hitachi Vantara

Overview

Challenge

• Accommodate explosive growth in data volumes triggered by fast-paced service innovation.

Solution

• Replace end-of-life disk storage arrays with dense, high-performance NVMe technology.

Outcome

• 3x reduction in storage footprint, 4x energy saving and 2.3x compression ratio, creating headroom for future digital initiatives.

Challenge

In Hungary, appetites for data-driven services are growing and Magyar Telekom is committed to deliver. The company offers digital experiences to millions of individuals and thousands of businesses across the country. To deliver its services, Magyar Telekom relies on more than 400 applications — from SAP business systems for the back office to the solutions that underpin its networks.

Tamás Krausz, BasePlatform Chapter Lead at Magyar Telekom, explains: “Magyar Telekom is constantly innovating to deliver even better customer services. In recent years, we’ve expanded our offering significantly with the launch of 5G and video-on-demand services — triggering explosive growth in data volumes. In total, we now store around 6 PB of data across the business, which is increasing at a rate of around 15% year over year.”

In previous years, as part of a major initiative to consolidate its data centers across the country, the company deployed Hitachi storage arrays with the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) for long-term archiving. For more than a decade, Magyar Telekom has relied on Hitachi Vantara storage solutions to manage and protect its mission-critical data.

“Over several years, we transitioned from a heterogeneous storage architecture to a single-vendor solution from Hitachi,” confirms Krausz. “In all that time, we have found Hitachi Vantara solutions to be extremely reliable, high-performing and secure — allowing us to deliver high availability for key systems such as our SAP ERP applications, Oracle Databases and VMware environments. As our Hitachi solutions approached end-of-life, we began the search for a new platform.”

Focusing on the future, Magyar Telekom looked for a dense, high-performance storage that reduces data center floorspace, improves energy efficiency and creates headroom for long-term data growth.

Solution

After exploring solutions from several market-leading storage vendors, Magyar Telekom decided to build on its success with Hitachi by replacing its existing VSP storage solutions with cutting-edge Hitachi VSP E1090 arrays — delivering high availability, ultra-low-latency performance and streamlined management.

“After a thorough evaluation, we decided that the new generation of Hitachi storage solutions would be the ideal fit for our long-term goals,” recalls Krausz. “With each Hitachi VSP E1090 we deploy, we can replace more than 1,200 disks across three racks with just 20 NVMe drives on a single rack — delivering the same 500 TB capacity in a much smaller physical footprint.”

As well as a 100% data availability guarantee from Hitachi, the new solution includes Hitachi Ops Center Automator and Hitachi Ops Center Administrator – enabling Magyar Telekom to accelerate storage provisioning and streamline administration using smart, best-practice workflows.

“We recently started using Hitachi Ops Center and can already see the potential to significantly reduce manual administration work,” says Krausz. “Overall, we’re also very impressed by how cost-effective the new solution is. We have significantly increased our IOPS while keeping cost and management complexity low.”

To deploy the new solutions, Magyar Telekom worked with its trusted local Hitachi business partner, MHM Computing Hungary.

“Another key factor in selecting the new Hitachi solutions is the quality and responsiveness of the support we receive,” adds Krausz. “We’ve been working with our partner ever since we first selected Hitachi VSP solutions more than a decade ago, and they’ve always been willing to go the extra mile for us. Although we have had occasional technical challenges, we’ve never had a critical issue with our Hitachi solutions; they just run and run. Compared to other enterprise storage vendors we’ve worked with, Hitachi is in a league of their own — their solutions are rock solid, which gives us peace of mind that our mission-critical data will be available around the clock.”

Outcome

Magyar Telekom is achieving more with less. By replacing 1,052 hard-disk drives with high performing 26 NVMe drives, the mission-critical systems run reliably, helping the company to elevate the digital experiences for customers.

“We are now using Hitachi VSP E1090 solutions to support our network core, SAP ERP business systems, Oracle Databases, Siebel CRM platform and VMware environments,” explains Krausz. “The new Hitachi solutions are three times more compact than our previous storage arrays and deliver a 2.3x compression ratio, which allows us to store more data in a smaller physical footprint — contributing to our long-term data center consolidation effort.”

He adds: “Moving to NVMe drives has also slashed our power and cooling requirements by a factor of four, helping us to shrink our carbon footprint, improve sustainability and reduce operational costs.”

By combining rapid provisioning from Hitachi Ops Center Automator with the high-performance NVMe technology at the heart of the new Hitachi VSP E1090 arrays, Magyar Telekom is empowering its business users to innovate.

“Our system owners are delighted with the new solution, as we can now offer them higher IOPS for vital applications,” comments Krausz. “At the moment, we’re mainly using the Hitachi VSP E1090 solution for mission-critical production services, but we also see a big opportunity to take advantage of the built-in data compression capabilities to optimize our test environments.”

Looking ahead, Magyar Telekom aims to accelerate the launch of new data-driven services using cloud technologies. Using Hitachi Global-Active Device, the organization is synchronously replicating data between two private cloud data centers, delivering high availability for key systems and minimizing the risk of data loss in a recovery scenario.

“We consider Hitachi Vantara to be a trusted partner with proven storage solutions,” concludes Krausz. “With Hitachi VSP E1090 solutions at the heart of our business, we’re in a stronger position than ever to deliver innovative digital solutions to customers across Hungary.”