Netic Delivers Fast, High Availability IT Services with Hitachi Storage

Overview

Challenge

• Serve customers effectively by meeting rigorous service level agreements for application infrastructure performance and availability.

Solution

• Create a robust, efficient storage infrastructure that adapts to the needs of different enterprise application workloads.

Outcome

• Netic delivers exceptional customer service and provides reliable, future-proof performance.

Challenge

IT services provider, Netic has built its reputation on providing ITIL-compliant IT operations and application lifecycle management for Denmark’s public and private sectors. Customers value Netic’s high performance, availability and security in the systems and applications it manages. The company is known for its commitment to delivering consistently on its service level agreements (SLAs).

Netic supports a wide range of business-critical systems for its customers, from performance-sensitive enterprise applications and databases running on dedicated servers through VMware virtual machines and container-based platforms. The performance of these systems depends heavily on the latency and throughput of their storage systems. To deliver the level of service customers require, Netic must have total control of the storage infrastructure.

That’s why Netic runs most of its customers’ workloads in its private cloud, using dedicated storage systems. To build a storage architecture that would meet all its performance, availability and security requirements, the company partnered with Hitachi.

Solution

As Netic’s primary storage infrastructure partner since 2009, Hitachi has been helping the company evolve its storage strategy to take advantage of new technologies and meet changing business needs.

Today, the latest generation of Netic’s private cloud is mainly built on Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E590 arrays. This all-NVMe storage delivers consistent and predictable low-latency performance for workloads with a variety of sizes and I/O profiles. Having the VSP E590 arrays as the building block of the storage architecture proved advantageous. It’s easy to sandbox each customer’s systems, boosting security. And scalability is easy — it’s simply a matter of adding a new VSP E590 node to the scale-out architecture.  

And because the VSP E590 arrays run the same Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) as Hitachi’s enterprise arrays, Netic can take advantage of enterprise-class features. For example, the company uses Hitachi Global Active Device to create storage clusters replicating data between multiple data centers, enabling business continuity and disaster recovery.

In addition to block storage, Netic also provides clients with high-performance, cost-effective object storage, using Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and HCP for Cloud Scale. The solution combines the flexibility of public cloud object storage services such as Amazon S3 with the security and control of Netic’s private cloud.

While Netic’s storage estate is extensive, Hitachi Ops Center keeps it easy to manage, providing a single view across the company’s storage arrays and automated tools for storage provisioning and management. Plus Netic is given real-time insight into storage performance and capacity across all its systems.

Outcome

Thanks to its close partnership with Hitachi, Netic has both the infrastructure and the support it needs to deliver consistently high availability, performance and security for all its customers’ business-critical applications.

For example, in more than a decade of using Hitachi storage systems, Netic has only experienced two storage controller failures because of the resilient design of the Hitachi storage architecture. Neither incident had any impact on application availability or performance. With Hitachi’s nondisruptive upgrade capabilities, there’s no need to take storage systems offline during software or firmware updates, so there’s no disruption to customer service. In fact, arrays running Hitachi SVOS are the only systems that Netic trusts to update during business hours, without the need for a scheduled maintenance window.

Steen Jensen, CEO of Netic, concludes: “The Hitachi VSP E590 platform gives us access to enterprise-class functionality at a midrange price point. That means we can provide our customers with highly cost-effective storage infrastructure without compromising performance or availability.”