Mining Company LKAB Selects Hedvig’s Software-Defined Storage Solution

Hedvig, Inc. announced that Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB), a supplier of iron ore to the steel industry, has selected the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform to transform how it stores and manages backup data.

In an industry faced with both significant opportunity and challenges, LKAB strives to operate as efficiently as possible, carefully selecting IT investments and architectures to maintain a competitive edge. LKAB’s choice of Hedvig means lower, more predictable costs for its storage hardware, software, and support.

“We looked at other software-defined solutions and found either that they encountered serious issues working in our environment, or that the vendors weren’t really committed to the product,” said Christoffer Niemi, IT architect, LKAB.

The company also evaluated public cloud storage and determined it to be a more costly solution.

“Hedvig’s product is easy to use and can grow with us. We just replace or add servers as we extend capacity and update the system. Hedvig’s approach is more predictable and leverages our investment in Cisco, which means a more predictable cost,” added Niemi.

LKAB relies on analysis of historical data to determine future mining operations, permanently storing data collected from a wide range of applications. The company found it a challenge when disk space ran out in traditional enterprise storage systems. Ordering and installing additional storage could take weeks, and each time the company met the limitations of a current solution, it faced a forklift upgrade of both hardware and software that was unnecessarily expensive and resource intensive.

Confronted with these challenges, LKAB worked with Layer 8 IT-Services AB, a storage, networking and security reseller, to identify and implement the Hedvig solution. This enabled LKAB to keep pace with changing business requirements and eliminate storage acquisition, provisioning and growth pains.

“LKAB was ready to adopt a software approach to storage, and we identified that Hedvig could deliver a more flexible and cost-effective infrastructure,” says Johan Tungström, CEO, Layer 8. “We worked closely with Hedvig to test and implement the solution, and LKAB has not only improved current operations, but is better equipped to manage future growth.“

The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform combines the power of distributed systems, the simplicity of cloud, and a complete set of enterprise capabilities to deliver a modern storage system. Hedvig technology provides LKAB the ability to scale as data grows, turning storage into an investment that is an appreciating asset as opposed to a disposable one that is discarded every three to five years.

Hedvig’s software works with LKAB’s existing Cisco UCS hardware, presenting a large deduplicated storage target to backup servers and clients in the environment. LKAB has configured the software to replicate data between racks in a single data center as well as to a secondary site for DR protection. The company expects to host more than 500TB of data on the Hedvig platform and has additional data and application use cases on the roadmap.

“Hedvig brings flexibility to numerous use cases, including backup. We’re providing all the features of enterprise storage, but with a distributed, software-based solution,” said Avinash Lakshman, CEO and founder, Hedvig. “We’re fortunate to have partners like Layer 8 who evangelize new solutions to pressing problems. By working with Layer 8 and Cisco, we’ve created a truly elastic solution that helps LKAB do more with trusted, standard servers.“

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