Kroll Ontrack Deploying HDS

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced that Kroll Ontrack, Inc. has virtualised and consolidated its storage environment by deploying a range of HDS solutions, including Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).

The new environment was installed to enable the company to better manage its data and allocate capacity more efficiently using a combination of VMware virtual machines and physical servers fronted by a single interface.

Kroll Ontrack is a provider of software, services and consulting to help legal, corporate and government entities recover, search, analyse, produce and present data efficiently and cost-effectively. With data volumes increasing constantly and its existing storage hardware coming to the end-of-maintenance, it needed to implement a scalable solution without impacting its ability to meet its customers’ performance and response time SLAs.

"We purchased Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2500 about a year ago and were very satisfied with its performance, so we were confident that HDS would provide us with a workable solution," said Cory Cater, technical architect, Kroll Ontrack. "We wanted to enhance our virtualisation capabilities in order to support replication for disaster recovery as well as to simplify capacity management and allocation across our infrastructure. It was therefore a natural choice for us to deploy Hitachi VSP."

The new storage environment now underpins all of the file and application servers at Kroll Ontrack, which are stored on VMware virtual machines, hosted on Hitachi VSP. The consolidated virtual storage environment is managed centrally, through a single interface provided by Hitachi Command Suite software. In all, the previous 12 storage racks have been replaced with three Hitachi VSP racks, which is expected to drive power and cooling savings for the data centre.

Cater continued: "Migrating data seamlessly using Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform has enabled us to efficiently handle information for ourselves and, more importantly, our customers."

The design, implementation and deployment of the solution were supported by experts from Hitachi Global Solution Services (GSS).

"We were very impressed with the work the team did for us," Cater added. "From the beginning of this project the team from Hitachi Data Systems has given us a great deal of support. They have made us feel like part of the family and are always there to provide advice. You can’t put a price tag on that."

Stephen Ball, VP and GM of UK, Ireland and South Africa at HDS, commented: "The decision by Kroll Ontrack to continue its relationship with Hitachi Data Systems with this latest virtualisation and consolidation project is a testament to how important data is viewed by the company. With customer service being of utmost importance to Kroll Ontrack, the accuracy and efficiency of the project process was crucial, and is being successfully delivered due to the strong understanding relationship developed between the two companies."