Casio Creates Cost-effective Virtualized Storage Infrastructure

Red Hat, Inc. and IBM Corporation announced that Casio Computer Company Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, has realized significant results in IT efficiency, performance and cost savings with a solution comprising Red Hat Storage, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM System x servers.

Casio’s world headquarters in Shibuya, Tokyo

By combining virtualized industry-standard servers with open software-defined storage, Casio now has a highly available and agile storage solution that can accommodate heavy data workloads by scaling to petabytes.

Casio Computer Co, established in 1957, is a manufacturer of consumer electronics and business equipment solutions including calculators, mobile phones, cameras, musical instruments and watches. The company previously used monolithic proprietary storage hardware and software that became expensive because the operation and maintenance had to be entrusted to the vendor.

Casio, with the help of premier IBM Business Partner Lightwell Ltd. Co., deployed Red Hat Storage into its existing infrastructure comprising Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM System x3650 servers to cut its high storage costs and to avoid inflexible vendor lock-in. IBM System x servers with Red Hat solutions were used to provide the backbone for the virtualized environment to offer reliability and support for new digital capabilities focused on increasing sales and visibility of Casio’s clock, digital cameras and tablets products.

Red Hat Storage acts as a data-store of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, the open datacenter virtualization solution built on industry performance of the Kernel-based VM (KVM) hypervisor. Within two years, Casio slashed its storage costs in half by integrating the internal storage disks of multiple servers and using it as one large storage pool that is accessible through the virtualized server. The Red Hat Storage management console also provides a simplified and unified way to manage both the storage and virtualized server environments for optimized performance.

Kazuyasu Yamazaki, group manager of the IT infrastructure group, Casio, said: “By deploying Red Hat Storage with Red Hat Virtualization running on IBM x series servers, we were finally able to build a storage environment at a low cost while using commodity servers. Our costs, including various procurement costs and operating fees, fell to less than half of what we had been spending before implementing Red Hat Storage. And, our IT usage was by no means optimal or efficient. We were locked in by vendors’ proprietary storage hardware technologies, so we couldn’t manipulate the system ourselves.“

Adalio Sanchez, GM, IBM x86 and PureSystems solutions, said: “Companies like Casio understand that virtualization is a business decision, providing them a competitive advantage by improving overall system utilization, increasing efficiency and lowering costs. IBM’s System x servers are specifically designed to provide the resiliency, flexibility, performance, economy, and ease of installation and operation that are essential to any virtualization solution.“

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage and big data, Red Hat, said: “Red Hat is pleased to assist Casio in slashing its storage costs and improving IT performance by deploying the powerful combination of open virtualized storage running on standard servers. The integrated management capabilities of Red Hat Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization enables Casio to easily fine-tune their infrastructure and help decrease the time to results.“