Building Reliable IT Infrastructure in Tornado Alley

Overview

Challenge

• Protect business-critical systems and data and ensure continuous operations even in the face of natural disasters.

Solution

• Move to a 3 data center infrastructure for additional resilience and harness Hitachi EverFlex to access latest-generation technology.

Outcome

• Increase resilience with instant failover, while improving performance, cutting power consumption and reducing monthly leasing costs.

Challenge

“Tornado Alley” is an apt nickname for the Great Plains region of the United States. Violent, long-track tornados tear through the area every few years, often causing millions of dollars of damage and disruption to homes and businesses. For a banking group that operates locations throughout the region, the risk of these twisters is a serious consideration for IT teams who need to keep their data centers up and running 24/7.

For more than a decade, the bank has trusted Hitachi Vantara to supply highly robust storage infrastructure – a decision that has proven its value on numerous occasions. Notably, when a tornado scored a direct hit on the bank’s main data center in 2017, its Hitachi storage arrays were back online within just a few hours – significantly faster than other systems.

That experience led the bank to place an even greater emphasis on reliability, installing additional infrastructure at a colocation facility near its primary site, and implementing a 3 data center architecture with Hitachi global-active device to enable near-instant failover in the event of another serious outage.

This new architecture served the bank well for many years, but several of the storage arrays were now more than eight years old and some data was still stored on outdated spinning disks. To take advantage of high-performance NVMe drives and a new generation of adaptive data reduction (ADR) technology, the bank decided to upgrade.

Solution

The bank had a long-standing strategy of leasing its Hitachi storage infrastructure instead of purchasing outright, which had the advantage of ensuring predictable monthly costs and enabling regular upgrades to the latest technology. For this most recent upgrade, the company decided to take advantage of Hitachi EverFlex, a more flexible infrastructure as a service (IaaS) delivery model that makes it even easier to scale capacity on demand as business needs evolve.

Under the EverFlex model, the bank was able to replace its aging Hitachi storage arrays with latest-generation Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5600 systems. By taking advantage of the platform’s adaptive data reduction features, the bank was able to compress and deduplicate data for several of its key applications by a ratio of 4:1, making more efficient use of the hardware and freeing up space for new data. As a result, even though the new infrastructure delivers significantly greater capacity and performance, the bank has reduced its monthly costs.

“Over the course of our relationship with the bank, we’ve always been as upfront as possible,” says Michelle Robinson, Enterprise Account Manager at Hitachi Vantara. “We’re constantly looking for ways to ensure they get more for their money. It’s notable that in our two most recent projects – the move from two data centers to three, and the upgrade to the VSP 5600s – their costs have gone down, not up.”

Outcome

Thanks to the VSP 5600 infrastructure’s significantly improved energy and space efficiency, the bank has made a 29% saving on data center floorspace, power and cooling costs, in addition to an $18K monthly saving on its leasing costs through EverFlex.

But for the bank, the financial benefits are less important than the rock-solid reliability of the Hitachi Vantara hardware and the extreme resilience of the 3 data center architecture. Hitachi’s 100% data availability guarantee has not been an empty promise. The bank has never had a serious hardware outage in more than a decade of relying on Hitachi storage systems and has never lost data from a Hitachi array.

“As the bank has grown from terabytes to petabytes, we’ve worked together to continuously improve reliability, and we’ve never missed a step,” Robinson says. “Today, their VSP 5600 systems are delivering massive improvements in performance, storage capacity and energy efficiency – and we’ve proven that it takes more than a tornado to knock us off our game.”