CASE STUDY
THE SYSTEM DELIVERED THE
CAPACITY, PERFORMANCE AND
STABILITY THAT WE NEED TO
ALLOW US TO MODERNISE OUR
IT INFRASTRUCTURE.
demands. Crocker added: “The additional
capacity was a must. Nexsan has allowed
us to meet our customer demands, giving
us the ability to scale and ensure our data
requirements are met now and in the future.”
Space was limited at its data centre so
density was important. This extra capacity
comes in half the rack space, helping to
save on storage, power and cooling costs,
fundamentally reducing the storage footprint.
With the help of partner, Softcat, The
Nottingham replaced the old IBM solution
with Nexsan’s E18P storage solution which
runs underneath its VMware platform in its
headquarters. Nexsan’s E-Series platform is
designed to provide high-density, high-
performance and scalable storage, ideal for
organisations that need to boost storage
and ROI.
In addition, the company wanted an
environment that would be easy to set up
and maintain. Deployment and migration
took just over 30 minutes.
Results
Since deployment, one of the main benefits
has been the additional capacity. The E18P
storage solution is designed to start small
and can easily scale up to 648TB as it is
needed. Currently the company is enjoying
20 times more capacity than was previously
available, allowing more space on each user
drive with plenty of scalability to meet future
www.intelligentcio.com
Crocker concluded: “The system delivered
the capacity, performance and stability that
we need to allow us to modernise our IT
infrastructure. This was essential for us to
continue to deliver, innovate and grow our
membership, offering customers a leading
service that is supported by a reliable and
robust IT.”
We asked Crocker some further questions
about the solution. Here’s what he had to say:
What prompted your initial belief
that Nexsan would be a good fit for
the company?
One of the main things we looked for was
reliability – it was absolutely key in this
purchase. We wanted something not simple
but simple to use and not overly complicated
and that absolutely fit the product that we
bought. There’s other parts to it too like
simple licensing – there was no complicated
or capacity licensing or anything unusual like
that, it was really straight-forward.
How important is it for The
Nottingham Building Society to have
the ability to scale?
One of the main things we use it for directly
affects our user base so if our user base
expands and it has done quite a lot over
the last couple of years, we were getting to
the point where the drive was filling up on a
daily basis and preventing staff from doing
their jobs. We can double what we’ve got
fairly simply at the minute and it wouldn’t
give us any problems if we needed a big area
to backup stuff to or suddenly balloon our
storage requirements – we now have plenty
of space for it.
How satisfied were you with the
time taken to install and utilise
the solution?
We got it out of the box, into the rack and
connected to the first server in about half
an hour. This is significantly quicker than
anything else I’ve ever dealt with that’s
similar. It was really, really good for that.
Our business revolves around our customers
and our branches so the last thing we
want to do is impact anybody stood in the
branch waiting to be dealt with. Having the
ability to not have to worry about that is
huge. Good IT is when the users don’t know
it’s even there and the solution allows us to
achieve this.
How has the increased capacity the
solution has enabled, benefitted the
company in the long term?
It means that if we suddenly need to expand
staff quickly, we have the capacity for it.
If we do need to do anything unusual and
we suddenly need loads of storage space
for a project, we don’t need to wait to
buy anything, we have it at our fingertips
straight away – we can react a lot quicker.
The solution allows us to act quicker, more
reliably and more efficiently. n
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