Dutch Croon Elektrotechniek Signs With HP

Hewlett-Packard Development company, L.P. announced that Croon Elektrotechniek B.V., a Dutch electrical installation company, has selected HP Converged Storage and HP Critical Advantage Services to improve data protection while reducing data center costs.

Croon has provided electrical installation services for more than 135 years. As business growth exceeded data center capacity, it experienced workflow disruptions resulting in application performance delays. It needed to replace its legacy infrastructure with a scalable platform to simplify management, reduce TCO and ensure around-the-clock application availability as demand increases.

Upgrading its infrastructure to HP 3PAR Storage, HP LeftHand Storage and HP StoreOnce Backup systems has provided Croon with increased capacity utilization and 99.999% uptime while reducing energy costs and simplifying data center administration. Croon leveraged HP Critical Advantage Services to improve performance of business-critical applications by optimizing use of its new virtualized infrastructure powered by HP ProLiant blades. The combination of proactive and reactive services delivered by HP enhanced performance, availability and functionality of technology across the environment.

"To prevent workflow disruptions and application performance delays, we needed a reliable storage platform," says Jhon Megens, IT manager, Internal ICT, Croon Elektrotechniek. "By automatically consolidating our data storage requirements into a single flexible process, HP Converged Storage has simplified data protection and provisioning, enabling our staff to focus less on IT administration and more on growing the business."

The tiered 3PAR Storage system delivers application availability, sustained performance and scalability. In addition to increasing Croon’s storage capacity, the system ensures immediate access to the most active data. This provides executives with real-time operational visibility to respond to changing market demands and customer requirements.

3PAR Thin Provisioning software allows Croon to manage storage-capacity upgrades, based on actual usage. Time-consuming manual administration is eliminated through automation and centralized management. 3PAR Virtual Copy software ensures business continuity with instant point-in-time snapshots of data for rapid application recovery. Additionally, HA LeftHand Storage systems in local offices eliminate single points of failure and provide automatic failover to further strengthen business continuity.

Croon’s branch offices replicate data to a central HP StoreOnce B6200 Backup System to protect growing volumes of data and simplify data management. Croon now backups all data to disk with deduplication software developed by HP Labs that provides up to 20 times more disk-space savings.

"Companies need the flexibility and simplicity of an integrated data center to increase performance while lowering costs," said Chris Johnson, VP, EMEA, Enterprise Storage, HP. "In addition to ensuring consistent business continuity, HP Converged Storage dramatically lowered Croon’s TCO by eliminating application downtime and increasing organization-wide productivity."

Financing solutions from HP Financial Services enabled Croon to expand the reach and impact of its technology budget by spreading payments over the lifetime of the HP storage infrastructure. As a result, Croon could conserve capital and gain operational savings.

Delivered by HP Converged Infrastructure Specialist Partner Scholten Awater, HP Converged Storage integrated with Croon’s existing HP ProLiant DL and BL G7 servers running SQL, Exchange 2010 and Hyper-V.