Managing billion-dollar investments with high-performance storage

Overview

Challenge

• When moving to the cloud proved costly and complex, this investment management company looked to enhance the performance and efficiency of its on-premises storage.

Solution

• Consolidated existing storage environment using more powerful Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5600 systems, and simplified management with Hitachi Ops Center.

Outcome

• Increases storage performance with sub-millisecond latency, ensures 100% data availability for mission-critical applications, and improves environmental sustainability.

Challenge

A leading investment management company helps clients achieve a more prosperous future. Working with individual investors, pension funds, banks and businesses, the company specializes in developing portfolios that deliver consistently strong returns, even in the face of uncertain market conditions.

To manage trillions of dollars of client investments, the company runs a powerful suite of software tools for risk analysis, regulatory reporting, trading and much more. For more than ten years, the company relied on Hitachi Vantara enterprise storage arrays to provide the performance and stability needed to keep this mission-critical application landscape available round-the-clock for investment managers and analysts.

Recently, the company made a strategic shift to move all applications and data workloads to the Microsoft Azure public cloud. However, the company significantly underestimated the costs and complexity of the cloud migration. In some cases, workloads were simply unsuitable for the cloud, while migrating others turned out to require more time and a much heavier lift than initially anticipated.

The company recognized that some workloads would have to remain running on an on-premises infrastructure, at least for the foreseeable future. It started to consider a new challenge: could it deploy a storage environment that would match and even surpass the performance, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability of public cloud?

Solution

To modernize its on-premises storage environment, the company looked to Hitachi Vantara and its channel partner CDW. Hitachi Vantara designed a solution to consolidate the existing storage environment while boosting performance.

As the key element in the modernization plan, the company will replace 10 older storage arrays with six Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5600 systems, equipped with NVMe SSDs, and providing total capacity of around 10 PB. The company will deploy four arrays in its production environment, one for testing and development and the final system as an airgap backup target. Using built-in adaptive data reduction tools will enable the company to achieve a 2:1 data compression ratio, helping to increase available capacity and optimize cost-efficiency.

Furthermore, Hitachi Ops Center will simplify management of the new environment. For example, the company will use Hitachi Ops Center Administrator to accelerate routine administration tasks, Ops Center Analyzer to create reports and track performance trends, and Ops Center Protector to streamline data replication processes.

Currently, the company is working with Hitachi Vantara to plan the implementation process for the Hitachi VSP 5600 arrays. Having built up considerable experience and expertise using Hitachi Vantara systems over the previous 10+ years, the company’s storage team will lead the deployment, using Hitachi Vantara’s non-disruptive migration functionality to minimize disruption and downtime during the switchover.

Outcome

The company is confident that the new on-premises storage environment will provide outstanding stability and resilience. Over the years that it has used Hitachi Vantara systems, the company has achieved almost 100 percent data availability, enabling its investment managers, risk analysts and other users of its key applications to work productively and efficiently at all times.

The new Hitachi VSP 5600 arrays will also ensure sub-millisecond response times for mission-critical applications. During the evaluation phase, the company ran performance tests on both the Hitachi Vantara systems and the Microsoft Azure cloud. The results showed that the Hitachi VSP 5600 arrays provide consistent 200 to 300 microsecond response times, which was much lower than the response times available on the cloud.

In addition, the new Hitachi Vantara environment will help the company achieve its environmental sustainability benefits. For example, consolidating the storage environment with more powerful Hitachi VSP 5600 systems will enable data center floorspace savings of around 70 percent and reduce power and cooling requirements by 62 percent — helping the company to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

Jim Fostiropoulos, Enterprise Account Manager at Hitachi Vantara, concludes: “Moving mission-critical workloads to the cloud often proves much more difficult than companies expect. Rather than taking on that risk and complexity, continuing to invest in Hitachi Vantara storage offers a tried-and-trusted stronger performance, security, and reliability than the cloud. It also makes sound financial sense, as the investment management company will achieve full return on investment within two years.”