Online Data Cloud Meets Clients’ Needs for Performance and Agility with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Overview

Challenge

• To grow its business, Online Data Cloud needed a scalable storage platform that could deliver high performance and low latency for the cloud services it provides to its clients.

Solution

• Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G700 enabled Online Data Cloud to replace its mechanical disk storage with a new all-flash architecture, dramatically improving performance and storage density.

Outcome

• Enabled a rapid transition to remote working for employees and clients during the COVID-19 crisis
• 30x performance improvement, accelerating key processing tasks from 15 minutes to 30 seconds
• 75% reduction in rack space requirements
• Capacity to support three years of growth without further upgrades

Challenge

Online Data Cloud (ODC) has 25 years’ experience in providing consultancy and customized cloud solutions to more than 120 clients in a variety of sectors, including airlines, food and beverage, plastics and clothing. Clients trust ODC to provide reliable, high-performance cloud solutions for mission-critical applications. Key services include an invoice messaging service that handles over 70 billion Brazilian Reals (US $13 billion) of transactions, and an electronic data interchange (EDI) service for airlines that processes huge volumes of data. The company is growing, and its clients’ needs are growing too. As data volumes continue to increase year-on-year, ODC must find smarter ways to handle more transactions while still meeting its service-level agreements on performance and latency.

For more than 12 years, the company has relied on Hitachi Vantara storage solutions to support its mission-critical transaction processing services, as well as helping it introduce new services such as a virtual desktop environment for its employees. However, ODC was reaching the limits of what it could accomplish with traditional mechanical disk-based storage and saw an opportunity to revitalize its storage landscape by moving to a more modern, flash-based architecture.

Solution

Boosting performance and flexibility with all-flash storage

ODC consulted Hitachi Vantara to find a solution that could deliver the performance and capacity it needed. After a full survey of the existing environment, the ODC and Hitachi teams worked together to create a plan that would minimize risk during the complex migration process. The main challenge was to consolidate storage from a range of older-generation Hitachi Unified Storage arrays to a single new Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G700 solution.

“Working with Hitachi Vantara, we were able to design and execute the migration within just eight days,” says Adriano Filadoro, CEO at ODC. “The result is a new flash-based storage architecture that not only provides better performance and scalability, but also improves our storage automation, monitoring and management capabilities.”

The storage upgrade was completed just in time to help ODC prepare for one of the most difficult crises in its history — the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. The company used the new storage system to scale up its virtual desktop environment to enable all of its employees to work from home and transitioned to a fully remote working model 15 days before the introduction of quarantine in the State of São Paulo.

Subsequently, the platform enabled ODC to expand its virtual desktop environment even further and offer it to clients as a new service. This innovation has helped the company’s clients continue working without disruption during the quarantine, with remote access to their data and without compromising on security and compliance.

Outcome

Driving long-term, sustainable business growth

With the Hitachi VSP G700, ODC now has a storage platform that has three times more capacity than its previous set of arrays, while occupying only 25 percent of the data center rack space — helping to reduce data center complexity, operational risk, and power and cooling costs.

The high-density flash module drives (FMDs) provide 800 terabytes of storage space, which should be sufficient to support the next three years of the company’s growth without requiring further upgrades. And even when expansion is eventually required, the platform can hold up to 2 petabytes of storage in a single rack unit, offering nearly unlimited capacity within the physical space constraints of ODC’s existing data center.

“The Hitachi Vantara solution gives us the scalability we need to support ODC’s ambitious growth plans over the coming years,” says Filadoro “We’ve also seen a huge jump in performance — tasks that used to take 15 minutes now take just 30 seconds to complete.”

He concludes: “Hitachi Vantara has helped us equip our business for the future, as well as increasing the agility of our response to the COVID-19 crisis. As a result, despite the disruption of the last few months, we have met our financial goals for the first half of the year, and we are in a strong position to meet our second-half targets.”