SimpliVity, a leader in hyperconverged infrastructure for IT, today announced that a new Australian customer has recently deployed SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution in order to simplify its IT environment and increase performance in its primary data center and disaster recovery co-location site.

SimpliVity partner, The IT Consultancy Group, identified the management of a cluttered data center with aging hardware and software as the key issues facing the Sydney-based Credit and Investment Ombudsman (CIO). The IT Consultancy Group recommended SimpliVity’s OmniCube hyperconverged infrastructure solution to meet the company’s IT infrastructure needs.

By deploying a pair of 2U, modular SimpliVity OmniCube CN-2200s in the primary data center and a third at a co-located site for disaster recovery, CIO has been able to vastly increase performance for report generation and achieve a 295:1 improvement in data efficiency; a figure that is climbing every day. SimpliVity’s OmniCube provides a globally federated, hyperconverged IT infrastructure platform that uniquely combines eight to twelve core data center functions below a VMware hypervisor. These include computation, storage, networking, backup, acceleration, replication and WAN optimization to provide real-time data efficiency, performance acceleration and global unified management in a single solution.

In weighing up options and selecting SimpliVity’s hardware and unique Data Virtualization Platform, Matt Grech, IT manager at the CIO said, “We just didn’t have the human capital to manage VMware running on a complex SAN with traditional servers. We were trying to figure out how to get the most resource efficient solution from a CapEx and OpEx perspective.”

The CIO’s legacy IT system was designed for the early stages of the company’s operations. Without any virtualization, the infrastructure impaired the CIO’s ability to expand and adapt to new business growth. The company’s servers were dedicated to running various applications and the organization performed weekly system backups and nightly incremental backups. While the CIO had only small amounts of data, this operation was manageable, however it became more challenging as the company grew. While this was viable for CIO’s early growth phase, a new strategy was needed that also improved data availability and enabled improved off-site data protection and disaster recovery.

Grech points out that moving the CIO’s IT infrastructure to a virtualized environment has resulted in multiple benefits for the company. “The migration from physical servers to VMware on SimpliVity OmniCube has significantly improved our customer user experience,” he says.

“From a data recovery perspective, we recently experienced a corruption in one of the main accounting applications, and the staff knew from experience that this would entail a lengthy recovery process across many hours. In contrast, now that we’re using SimpliVity, I was able to restore the full virtual machine of the accounting application directly from vCenter in a matter of minutes using a backup taken only 15 minutes prior to the corruption. The company is impressed by this new business agility we have at our fingertips.”

“We are delighted to be working with The IT Consultancy Group and the Credit and Investment Ombudsman to deploy a data center solution that aligns to the flexibility and scalability that their virtual environment requires,” said Scott Morris, Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, SimpliVity. “Not only is SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure much more efficient than their legacy infrastructure, it is also delivering the IT team the flexibility to easily manage their entire data centre infrastructure from within VMware vCenter.”

Key benefits to CIO included:

• Achieving 295:1 data efficiency
• Four fold performance gains for report generation
• Three-fold reduction in rack space
• Native, VM-centric DR capabilities with enterprise-class SLAs
• New agility enabling Test/Dev capabilities