FEATURE
WITH INFINIDAT , WE ENDED UP
EXCEEDING OUR GOALS WITH A TECHNOLOGY
THAT SURPASSES ALL-FLASH AT PRICE POINTS
THAT HELP MAKE US A STRONG , COMPELLING
HOSTING PROVIDER .
With its broad range of integrations , Infinidat was able to offer VDC the support for Hyper-V . Specifically , one of Infinidat ’ s biggest differentiators was the ability to do integrated snapshotting with Hyper-V – even at the Volume Shadow Storage level .
“ We were one of the earlier Hyper-V customers of Infinidat and when the snapshotting option came up and Infinidat confirmed we could actually do hourly snapshots , that was big on sealing the deal ,” said Thompson . “ We were going to get ample amounts of storage back .” VDC selected the InfiniBox F2260 , with effective storage over a petabyte , which is the scale the company needed to grow to .
Long-term benefits : Uptime , consolidation and cost savings
Fully implemented in October 2019 , the data storage system has had 100 % storage uptime , according to VDC ’ s President and CEO . Much to his satisfaction , the company was able to consolidate its storage and not see any downtime at all .
“ We were able to consolidate five or six other SANs into a single SAN ,” said Thompson . “ We ’ re talking multiple racks into a single rack . That is also a benefit from a power and a management perspective . We took everything from all of these other SANs and migrated them onto a single platform . Instead of managing multiple , separate other SANs and managing firmware upgrades , we got everything upgraded to InfiniBox , which makes the administration much simpler .”
VDC has also benefitted from the flexibility , the predictability and the ease of use as well as the exceptional , advanced service and support . “ We love how Infinidat lets you pay for the storage and grow as you need ,” he said . “ For us , we really like the idea of being able to buy the entire box and leverage storage as required , while knowing exactly what our budget was . Storage like this you don ’ t buy for three years . You buy it for a long period of time .”
On service and support , he added : “ We went with a five-year support and warranty package , which is great because we get monthly scheduled calls with Infinidat . It is really a white glove service . It ’ s great to be able to put everything on one simple-to-use interface .”
Moreover , the cost savings that VDC garnered , as a result of selecting Infinidat , was substantial . Thompson said : “ We had all of this available storage and IO capacity , which was really what we needed , plus easier management . If you take the cost of colocation on a perrack basis and all of that power , it ’ s a significant saving on an annual basis . With Infinidat , we ended up exceeding our goals with a technology that surpasses all-flash at price points that help make us a strong , compelling hosting provider .”
One other unexpected benefit was that Infinidat led VDC to see and embrace the value to evolve into a mixed environment of Hyper-V and VMware , especially after VDC acquired Blacksun Web Hosting , an exclusively VMware shop . The return on investment was rooted in having a storage platform that works extremely well with both environments . It sets VDC apart from its competitors and , with Disaster Recovery ( DR ) and speed , customers looking for storage are choosing VDC as a preferred vendor for their cloud hosting solutions . VDC also leverages Veeam technology and values the Veeam integration that exists on InfiniBox .
Thompson added : “ Knowing we could have this ability with Infinidat provided unparalleled DR capabilities , which is something that definitely made it one of our choices , especially when considering what we want to do for additional storage moving forward . The capabilities that Infinidat has with Veeam and VMware are phenomenal .”
Bottom line of the Infinidat solution for VDC , as summed up by VDC ’ s top leader : “ Immediate impact .” �
38 www . intelligentdatacentres . com