Hitachi Delivers Managed Storage Solution With Large All-Flash Deployment

Overview

Challenge

• Provide fast, flexible, on-demand managed storage services to meet changing business requirements.

Solution

• Deploy all-flash technology with transparent failover, backed by an experienced services team.

Outcome

• Reliable and flexible storage-on-demand services.
• Nondisruptive storage migration: 30% faster.
• Support for continuously growing data volumes.
• Increased capacity and improved performance while reducing footprint and power consumption in the data center.

Challenge

Respond Dynamically to Changing Storage Needs

For many years, the BMW Group and Hitachi Vantara have been working together successfully in the area of data storage. The company procures its storage capacity using a storage-on-demand model. Hitachi Vantara provides managed storage services and has full responsibility for operating the storage infrastructure.

Information has become more important across all processes and industries. Ever increasing data volumes, big data and new technology trends in mobility and manufacturing, such as Industry 4.0 and the internet of things (IoT), have created new demands for storage infrastructure.

For a future-proof storage environment, Hitachi Vantara wanted to provide a highly flexible storage solution that enabled the team to respond dynamically to changing storage requirements. An infrastructure refresh based on advanced storage technology, standardization and automation was chosen to help increase storage performance, and to improve data center and environmental efficiency even further.

Taking advantage of its latest products, Hitachi Vantara aimed at delivering a complete solution, offering fast and reliable storage within a confined data center footprint and with limited cooling capacity.

Solution

Fully Managed, All-Flash Infrastructure

Hitachi Vantara designed a forward-looking enterprise storage architecture that could cope with increasing storage volumes generated at the BMW Group. Taking into account the company’s capacity and performance specifications, Hitachi recommended deploying an all-flash solution to support the storage expansion.

To deliver managed storage services, Hitachi operated the storage solution within agreed service and quality levels. Measuring against defined business metrics, Hitachi Vantara selected the technology it sees as the best fit with the company’s business and technical requirements.

Following a successful proof of concept, Hitachi Vantara and the BMW Group worked together to finalize and deploy the new storage solution. At the core of the third generation of the storage-on-demand model is Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G1500 (VSP G1500), with all-flash selected for its outstanding for its outstanding performance and high storage density. The storage solution also includes a large all-flash SAN deployment with Brocade, a Broadcom Limited Company.

Hitachi Vantara equipped the storage systems with its unique flash module technology to deliver a complete solution for superior speed, flexibility, reliability and capacity utilization. To ensure data consistency and support transparent, fully automated failover with zero downtime for 24/7 availability, Hitachi deployed its global-active device.

Minimizing the impact on the application landscape, Hitachi refreshed the storage infrastructure with a nondisruptive migration plan. It used storage virtualization to reduce the administration workload and cut the transition time, helping the team to move to the new environment quickly and fully benefit from the newer technologies as soon as possible.

Outcome

Hitachi Vantara implemented a storage infrastructure that meets the requirements of the BMW Group. Following the successful deployment of the new storage solution, the new nondisruptive migration process was completed 30% faster than previous migrations and required less coordination between teams, increasing overall efficiency. After the migration, Hitachi decommissioned the old storage systems, which directly translated into cost savings for the overall storage-on-demand solution.

This approach enabled Hitachi to add storage capacity while reducing the physical footprint in the data center, offering significant savings on energy and cooling. As agreed between Hitachi Vantara and the BMW Group, the managed storage services allow flexible capacity adjustments to meet changes in demand, including sudden spikes, without compromising on performance.

To streamline IT processes, Hitachi has standardized business continuity configurations, changing from host-based to storage-based metro clustering. By using Hitachi data protection solutions, the team is also reducing software licensing costs and administration workload, offering a competitive storage-on-demand solution.

Hitachi Vantara Global Services proactively monitors the storage solution and reports the key metrics regularly to the BMW Group. The Global Services team analyzes trends in capacity usage and dynamically moves workloads to the most appropriate storage systems, increasing efficiency and performance for the storage-on-demand service. Storage analytics, flexible performance optimization and predictive maintenance help ensure Hitachi always reaches or exceeds the agreed service levels.

By taking responsibility for the enterprise storage solution, Hitachi Vantara frees up the company’s IT resources to focus more on strategic IT planning. During the implementation, the Hitachi team has shown its capability to work on nonstandard tasks, cooperating with other service providers to safeguard reliability and performance.