Situation Review

One of the largest privately held manufacturers of electrical equipment in North America was running out of storage space. Not for its physical inventory of myriad switches, outlets and lighting controls, but for its primary and DR data storage as well as backup.

The incumbent vendor was deeply entrenched. Until recently, the customer would not even consider another storage vendor. But their last upgrade was  approximately five years ago, and they were now completely out of storage. Updates could not be performed, systems were getting outdated, and they were having performance issues with three large Oracle databases. Multiple disparate systems meant many panes of glass to manage them. Clearly it was time for a major upgrade.

Competitive Landscape

Although the incumbent was presenting a proposal to retain the account, the real competition was the team of Pure Storage and Rubrik. They recommended a two-controller architecture using 16GB switches, but Rubrik storage is for back-up only, whereas HPE/Cohesity/IIS could deliver a unified primary storage, backup and compute solution.

The Winning Solution

HPE, Cohesity and IIS met often with the customer to understand their needs and offer multiple storage options including legacy 3Par, Primera, Storeonce, Cohesity and Brocade Fabric. The HPE Oracle team was engaged to assess the database environment using DPP. The recommendation was made to replace their existing DL580 Gen8 systems with new Flex Superdome systems and also create a true HA/DR environment using ServiceGuard. This single solution encompassed primary storage and backup and was comprised of HPE Storage Primera and Cohesity secondary storage on Apollo servers employing a four-controller architecture with 32GB Brocade MCS SD Flex switches.

But in the end, the deciding factor was a 100% availability guarantee from HPE with a single point of contact for all support, plus guaranteeing they would always have enough useable disk space. This lowered the total cost of ownership and made the management's decision an easy one.

Business Outcomes

Today, the manufacturer's IT capabilities feature tremendous storage scalability with lightning-quick performance for both primary storage and the Oracle databases on the Flex Superdome systems. Cohesity secondary storage provides the ability to archive to the cloud and quickly spin up apps. They gained a high availability environment they never had before for the Oracle databases via ServiceGuard. And, IT is very happy to have one solution for primary storage, backup and compute, and to be able to manage them all internally from a single pane of glass rather than having to call a vendor to make changes.


IIS - Your Partner for Primary and Secondary Data Storage

International Integrated Solutions (IIS) is a managed services provider and systems integrator. We are a leading partner of both HPE and Cohesity with deep expertise in storage and database solutions. Contact IIS to learn how we can upgrade your system performance and capabilities while streamlining IT management loads.

cohesity

  HPE-partner-of-the-year-sm