Shaping the Future of Energy With Storage Modernization

Overview

Challenge

• Ensure reliable energy services and prepare for innovation by streamlining IT operations and improving scalability and resilience.

Solution

• Modernize and consolidate critical compute and storage solutions to get ready for future business challenges in a dynamic energy market.

Outcome

• Saves 50% in infrastructure costs and boosts flexibility, while delivering a 2.7x lift in storage efficiency and completing backups 4x faster.

Challenge

For the Swiss regional utility company St.Galler Stadtwerke, providing reliable electricity, water, gas and heating to over 80,000 local citizens is the top priority. Residents of the City of St.Gallen and the surrounding areas rely on these services 24/7, and it’s the job of St.Galler Stadtwerke to make sure that everything works, all the time.

At the same time, St.Galler Stadtwerke also wants to shape the future of energy by moving towards smarter energy management and renewable energy sources. These trends in the energy sector require a digital modernization and Internet of Things (IoT) systems to deliver more sustainable energy services.

Dominik Sieger, ICT System Engineer at St.Galler Stadtwerke, explains: “Our focus is to drive digitalization and enable innovation in our business.”

To increase its efficiency and flexibility and prepare for all these future challenges, St.Galler Stadtwerke looked to consolidate its operational systems, which ran in two separate environments. “Our goal was to streamline the operations of our critical utility delivery services,” says Dominik Sieger. “We wanted to reduce the number of vendors and start fresh with a modern, clean architecture that would make management easier while ensuring the highest levels of availability.”

Solution

St.Galler Stadtwerke compared a few options and decided that a comprehensive solution from Hitachi Vantara, designed by implementation partner LC Systems-Engineering AG (LC Systems), offered the best value at the best price with the highest reliability.

“We’re not running ordinary office IT here, our systems are critical infrastructure,” adds Dominik Sieger. “Our partner LC Systems understood the importance of delivering a highly resilient architecture. They recommended Hitachi Vantara because they are high-quality, offer proven reliability and are very cost-efficient.”

Together with LC Systems, St.Galler Stadtwerke deployed eight Hitachi Advanced Server DS120 systems to run nearly 200 virtual machines on a VMware virtualization cluster. All mission-critical data is stored on two geographically distributed Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E590 nodes with an all-flash NVMe drive configuration. Using Hitachi global active device, the utility company ensures the highest data availability for its storage infrastructure.

To move both its existing environments to the new Hitachi Vantara solution without interruptions, LC Systems developed a phased approach for the move. First, one environment was connected to the new Hitachi Vantara systems and all virtual machines were transferred to the new infrastructure using VMware vSphere vMotion live migration. Then, after the second environment had been migrated, the team enabled Hitachi global active device to ensure continuous operations and maximize business continuity.

“Thanks to the ideas and advice from LC Systems, we completed the migration to the consolidated Hitachi Vantara solution quickly and without any issues,” remembers Dominik Sieger. “Managing the new storage platform is very easy with Hitachi Ops Center Administrator.”

St.Galler Stadtwerke was also impressed by how fast Hitachi Vantara could deliver. “Of course, we also looked at lead times when we made our decision,” confirms Dominik Sieger. “By choosing Hitachi Vantara, we could start consolidating our environments three weeks after we placed the order. With other vendors, the lead time would have been at least six months, that’s 10x longer. This would have delayed our efforts and created additional costs because we would have needed to keep the old solution running for so much longer.”

To accelerate its backup and restore operations, St.Galler Stadtwerke deployed two additional Hitachi VSP E590 storage systems, one of which is located at a third data center for additional data protection. The company relies on the Veeam Data Platform for easy backup and recovery of its entire VMware environment. “It’s a great benefit for us that we can use the same storage platform with an all-flash configuration for production performance and also with spinning disks for very cost-efficient backups and archiving,” explains Dominik Sieger. “Our backup solution from Veeam perfectly integrates with the Hitachi storage, making all our backup processes much faster. We’ve also deployed two additional Hitachi Vantara servers to our third data center so we can use it as independent disaster recovery location if necessary.”

Outcome

St.Galler Stadtwerke successfully consolidated and simplified its mission-critical Operational Technology (OT) environment. The utility company has saved approximately 50% compared to other vendors, thanks to Hitachi Vantara’s exceptional cost-efficiency.

“The new solution by LC Systems and Hitachi Vantara was easy to implement and offers outstanding availability and performance,” says Dominik Sieger. “Its automation capabilities have helped us to reduce manual storage management tasks and boosted the productivity of our team.”

By taking advantage of the built-in adaptive data reduction features of the VSP E590, St.Galler Stadtwerke benefits from a substantial increase in effective storage capacity. “We were positively surprised when we realized that for our production data, we were achieving a saving ratio of 1:2.7,” explains Dominik Sieger. “For backup data, the saving ratio is even better, at 1:10. This gives us more flexibility and allows us to provide a better, more agile service to our internal development and application teams.”

The faster performance of the all-flash storage helps St.Galler Stadtwerke improve reliability and deliver new capabilities for the business much more quickly. “In the past, it was cumbersome and slow to set up new systems for development or testing,” confirms Dominik Sieger. “Now, we can provision new systems 6x faster, within just a few minutes.”

Moreover, thanks to the additional storage capacity, the company has also improved its development and testing processes. “We’re now working to provide a test environment for every single system,” says Dominik Sieger. “As a result, developers can try new things and safely release new features on a regular basis to help our business adjust to the increasingly dynamic requirements of the energy industry.”

He continues: “We’re also very happy with the Hitachi Vantara support. We always receive fast feedback even for non-critical requests. This enables us to continuously optimize our environment and deliver better OT infrastructure services for the business and our customers.”

Finally, the new solution has also accelerated all-important data backups at St.Galler Stadtwerke. “For safety reasons, we always do full backups, every night,” says Dominik Sieger. “In the past, some systems took up to 10 hours, which was becoming a real challenge. Now our backups are 4x faster, taking less than 3 hours.”

Dominik Sieger concludes: “With LC Systems, we have found a reliable partner we can trust. Together with LC Systems and Hitachi, we’ve created the foundation for future-driven innovation. The new platform offers us the scalability we need to leverage IoT and digitalization. We’re also exploring ways to boost environmental sustainability in the city with smart city projects. For example, we’re beginning to monitor the fill levels of public garbage cans to optimize route planning and collection schedules, saving costs and reducing the city’s carbon footprint.”