Boosting Business Continuity and Productivity With Cost-Efficient Data Storage

Solution

To strengthen its business continuity and modernize its IT infrastructure, HAINZL looked for a fully redundant data storage solution. The company worked closely with its trusted partner K-Businesscom, a member of CANCOM Group, to evaluate different storage solutions including the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E590.

“We analyzed three storage systems from different vendors,” says Gerd Schachinger. “The full-flash Hitachi VSP E590 is a great fit for our business needs as a medium-sized company with a wide range of systems and applications. Its active-active cluster configuration offers superior performance and availability compared to the other two solutions we considered.”

K-Businesscom helped HAINZL install a highly available cluster solution with two Hitachi VSP E590 deployed at different locations for maximum data protection. HAINZL now relies on these Hitachi storage systems for all its essential business applications.

“We have 100 virtual machines running on our VMware virtualization cluster, and they’re all hosted on the Hitachi VSP E590,” confirms Gerd Schachinger. “The Hitachi storage delivers great performance across all our business applications and workloads. Thanks to the all-flash configuration, we need fewer drives to achieve optimal performance, saving costs and increasing the energy efficiency and scalability of our central storage cluster.”

 “We were relying on a system that had failed before, so we wanted to move quickly to protect our business,” remembers Gerd Schachinger. “Other vendors told us it could take easily three months to ship their systems. With Hitachi, the lead times were 80 percent shorter, so we could move to a fully redundant storage architecture much faster.”

With the new VSP E590 systems installed, HAINZL began using Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer to gain advanced storage insights, keep track of capacity, utilization and plan ahead.

“Our previous solution required additional configuration to collect historic data, and we never had the right reports available to make data-driven decisions,” says Gerd Schachinger. “With Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer, we get useful real-time dashboards and historic data analytics out of the box. We also use the predictive analytics to optimize our storage planning.”

The company also uses Hitachi Ops Center to manage its storage cluster from a central point of control. “We now have streamlined, consolidated storage management with smart automation,” adds Gerd Schachinger. “Hitachi Ops Center’s AI and machine learning algorithms mean that we barely need to adjust anything manually. The Hitachi solution saves us time and just works.”

HAINZL has been working closely with K-Businesscom for many years and appreciates the value of a partner that understands its entire IT environment. “We know we can trust K-Businesscom,” says Gerd Schachinger. “If they recommend a solution, we can be sure that it will suit us very well. They were also key in the design and smooth delivery of the solution.”

Outcome

By choosing Hitachi data storage, HAINZL saved about €100,000 compared to a similar solution from a competitor. And thanks to the 2:1 compression and deduplication factor achieved through Hitachi Adaptive Data Reduction technology; the company has reduced the storage space needed to run its 100 virtual machines by 50%.

Business users at HAINZL are impressed by the performance of the new infrastructure. “Many reports and regular tasks are much faster now,” elaborates Gerd Schachinger. “One colleague regularly waited for seven seconds for a report before he could continue with his main task. Today, he can access the figures instantly in about a second, that’s 85 percent faster. This really helps him to be more productive and work more effectively. In general, all our applications run much quicker and more smoothly now. Little things like opening a large file more quickly actually make a big difference for the user experience and ultimately also employee satisfaction.”

HAINZL is a big fan of the proactive support and maintenance provided by Hitachi through its Preferred Customer Services with the Services Account Manager option. “The proactive maintenance service is a big benefit for us,” confirms Gerd Schachinger. “The Hitachi team routinely analyzes our complete configuration and recommends software updates, security fixes and other optimizations. As a result, our storage solution is more secure and more reliable, helping us to maximize the availability of our business applications for all our users.”

The team at HAINZL is already planning to take advantage of the built-in storage snapshot features to protect the business more effectively against ransomware and reduce exposure to cyberthreats and IT security risks.

And as HAINZL continues to modernize and automate its production facilities, the Hitachi solution offers the performance and scalability needed to facilitate state-of-the-art, Industry 4.0 manufacturing processes with the Internet of Things integration.

Gerd Schachinger concludes: “The Hitachi VSP E590 is a very solid storage solution delivering outstanding quality and performance at an attractive price. Throughout the implementation, the collaboration between us, K-Businesscom and Hitachi has been great.”