Masternaut Selects Dell

Masternaut Ltd, European telematics provider, has introduced Dell, Inc.’ storage to its IT infrastructure to improve performance, reduce costs and support future expansion.

“In terms of online storage, the new infrastructure has enabled Masternaut to ensure resilience and operational efficiency,” said Alex Rothwell, CTO, Masternaut “Since upgrading the software to Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3, we have seen an immediate reduction in latency, allowing us to extend the platform capacity by increasing the number of IO/s which more than doubles our storage performance.”

The ability to carry out software upgrades quickly, and with no additional costs or interruption to its services, means that Masternaut has been able to double the amount of vehicles that it is able to manage on each storage platform without needing to make an additional financial investment. Moving forward, Dell’s flexible scale out design means that if the company requires more storage capacity it has to add more spindles.

Masternaut tracks and monitors drivers, vehicles and mobile assets across Europe, processing, analysing and storing around 150 million data transactions every day. The real-time information captured by these transactions covers everything from vehicle movements and whereabouts, alarm activations and driver performance. Insights gleaned from this intelligence enables Masternaut’s customers to reduce the cost of running fleets by better managing fuel consumption, fleet coordination and responsible driving, leading to reduced fuel costs, improved efficiency and lower insurance premiums.

“Providing real time information is a core part of our business, so having an IT infrastructure which can support this is vital,” adds Rothewell. “There is a correlation between the performance of our storage infrastructure and the customer experience; as we process such a high volume of real time data each day, it is essential that every area of our infrastructure – especially our storage environment – is able to operate quickly and with extremely low latency.”

Masternaut carried out a major hardware upgrade and as part of that process invested in a single Dell Compellent SC40 array which ran 200 disks and supported 50TB of data. After a year, Masternaut extended this infrastructure with three additional Compellent SC8000 controllers, each with 200 drives. Two of the arrays are located in France and the other two in the UK and collectively, this environment could support 350TB of data. The expansion of Masternaut’s Dell storage infrastructure was completed in six hours with zero downtime and without the need to shut down the application platform.

“We are constantly working to improve the QoS that we deliver to our customers and working with Dell Storage has both supported our immediate need for high performance and resilience and our longer term goal for a cost effective and scalable architecture, which can grow alongside our business,” said Martin Hiscox, chairman and CEO , Masternaut.

“At Dell, we understand that in today’s economic climate, keeping an eye on costs is more vital than ever for businesses and their customers,” said Aisling Keegan, GM and executive director, preferred accounts, Dell UK. “Dell Storage offers businesses the ability to enhance their scalability and performance, as well as carry out software updates at no additional cost. This allows them to easily expand their storage architecture without the need to ‘rip and replace’ their existing infrastructure. Masternaut is a prime example of how Dell can improve the performance of a company’s supporting storage infrastructure; helping them take their product to market quicker and grow the business more effectively.“