“With InfiniBox, we’re obtaining the high performance and exceptional reliability we need to meet our technology goals,” said Michel Danon, senior vice president and chief information officer at HMSA. “At the same time, we’re getting the best overall storage pricing and exceeding our cost objectives.”
HMSA also chose InfiniBox for its ability to support the organisation’s new data centre model. HMSA had been using one of its data centres as the main production data centre. The other was used for disaster recovery. By installing the InfiniBox system, HMSA is now able to ensure faster, more reliable data recovery in both locations. This means both data centres are now active production centres and can provide disaster recovery.
“With our previous storage system, the replication time for 80 GB of virtual machines was anywhere from 55 to 90 minutes. With the InfiniBox systems, we reduced the replication time to only six seconds,” explained Danon.
During Proof of Concept testing with the InfiniBox, HMSA recorded before and after metrics and was astounded at what else they found.
“InfiniBox was subjected to the most rigorous testing we’ve ever conducted on a storage platform, about three times more testing than our previous system,” explained Joe McVicker, senior storage administrator at HMSA. “We were seeing lower write latency than the all-flash array we use for our VDI. That is very impressive for a hybrid array. For me, that’s paramount. Whatever we put on the InfiniBox, I know that write latency is pretty much non-existent.”
HMSA has migrated most of its VMware, Vcloud, private clouds, and user testing areas onto InfiniBox. It is currently in the process of migrating most of its production workloads and plans to build out new infrastructure that will also go onto the InfiniBox.
“We’re shuffling most of our application data sets onto the InfiniBox architecture,” explained McVicker. “Confidence is really, really high when it comes to deciding ‘where do we put it?’. We don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s going on the InfiniBox, plain and simple.”
