Valuation services company Quotable Value is achieving a 30% improvement in response times for internal applications after replacing its Hewlett-Packard disk arrays with a Hitachi Data Systems modular storage system.
“It’s everything we hoped for and more,” says IT general manager Bryce Johnson. “That improvement was achieved at installation, without any fine tuning.” The HP RA4100 technology was getting old.
“We had an HP buy policy," he says, " but there were a couple of issues with service that didn’t give us confidence that they could support what we wanted so we talked round the market and found that a lot of what was out there was re-branded Hitachi."
The discovery engendered confidence in the Hitachi offering which was also significantly cheaper, says Johnson. And it was realised that a single consolidated storage platform was a better way to manage the company’s growing information.
“Our storage was spread across different technologies, so we needed to bring it together to better manage our growth and to improve the speed of back-ups and restores, he says. In one case, a weekly database restore that previously took two-and-a-half hours now takes 35 minutes.
The HDS 9570 connects to the storage area network through a 2Gb fibre connection, can be scaled up to 32 terabytes, and supports rapid database growth without major reconfiguration by collecting portions of the SAN’s physical disks into pools, handing out logical slices and preventing hosts from accessing storage resources they don’t own.
“We’ve been able to increase the size of our disk pools, which means our databases can get bigger without us having to do major reconfigurations,” Johnson says.
“We’ve migrated about half the production data and will complete that over the next few months.”