Masternaut selects Dell to improve enterprise storage performance

Masternaut, Europe’s largest telematics provider, has introduced Dell Storage to its IT infrastructure to improve performance, reduce costs and support future expansion.

“In terms of online storage, the new infrastructure has enabled Masternaut to ensure resilience and operational efficiency,” said Alex Rothwell, CTO for Masternaut “Since upgrading the software to Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3, we have seen an immediate reduction in latency, allowing us to extend the platform capacity by increasing the number of input/output operations per second which more than doubles our storage performance.”

The ability to carry out software upgrades quickly, and with no additional costs or interruption to its services, means that Masternaut has been able to double the amount of vehicles that it is able to manage on each storage platform without needing to make an additional financial investment. Moving forward, Dell’s flexible scale out design means that if the company requires more storage capacity it simply has to add more spindles.

Masternaut tracks and monitors drivers, vehicles and mobile assets across Europe, processing, analysing and storing around 150 million data transactions every day. The real-time information captured by these transactions covers everything from vehicle movements and whereabouts, alarm activations and driver performance. Insights gleaned from this intelligence enables Masternaut’s customers to reduce the cost of running fleets by better managing fuel consumption, fleet coordination and responsible driving, leading to reduced fuel costs, improved efficiency and lower insurance premiums.

“Providing real time information is a core part of our business, so having an IT infrastructure which can support this is vital,” adds Rothewell. “There is a correlation between the performance of our storage infrastructure and the customer experience; as we process such a high volume of real time data each day, it is essential that every area of our infrastructure – especially our storage environment - is able to operate quickly and with extremely low latency.”

Masternaut carried out a major hardware upgrade and as part of that process invested in a single Dell Compellent SC40 array which ran 200 disks and supported 50 terabytes of data. After a year, Masternaut extended this infrastructure with three additional Dell Compellent SC8000 Controllers, each with 200 drives. Two of the arrays are located in France and the other two in the UK and collectively, this environment could support 350 terabytes of data. The expansion of Masternaut’s Dell storage infrastructure was completed in six hours with zero downtime and without the need to shut down the application platform.