Australian Agency Credit and Investment Ombudsman With SimpliVity's Hyperconverged Infrastructure

SimpliVity Corp. announced that an Australian customer has recently deployed its hyperconverged infrastructure solution in order to simplify its IT environment and increase performance in its primary data center and DR co-location site.

SimpliVity partner, The IT Consultancy Group Pty Ltd, 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 Ltd (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 OmniCube CN-2200s in the primary data center and a third at a co-located site for DR, CIO has been able to increase performance for report generation and achieve a 295:1 improvement in data efficiency; a figure that is climbing every day. OmniCube provides a federated, hyperconverged IT infrastructure platform that 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 unified management in a single solution.

In weighing up options and selecting SimpliVity’s hardware and unique Data Virtualization Platform, Matt Grech, IT manager, 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 DR.

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 SimpliViy OmniCube has 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 VM 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, VP, AsiaPac 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: