NetApp All-Flash Array Supporting Vital Energi in Transforming Data into Energy Savings

Headquartered in the UK city of Blackburn, with offices in Scotland and London, Vital Energi Ltd designs, builds, operates, and maintains sustainable and renewable methods of energy generation, distribution, and management.

Part of the company’s offering is to analyze energy consumption data with the aim of reducing carbon emissions and energy bills for their customers. Its projects are wide ranging, from the installation, repair and operation of district heating and cooling networks, to smart heat metering and billing, and ESCO (Energy Services company) services.

“To keep pace with continued growth and better serve our customers, we needed to overhaul our IT infrastructure,” said Jon Woan, IT manager, Vital Energi. “As a result of working with Gardner and NetApp, we now have an efficient, scalable solution that enables us to deliver more services and savings to our customers.“

To accommodate increasing growth, the company needed to overhaul its IT infrastructure and ensure its systems could continue to operate at optimal levels, delivering the best solutions to customers. 

Working with Gardner Systems plc, Vital Energi deployed a NetApp all-flash array to speed performance and deployed NetApp AltaVault cloud-integrated storage to help the company meet mandatory backup requirements. As a result, the company can run enterprise applications up to 20 times faster, scale to meet business demand, reduce its own power consumption, and quickly process reports from growing data sets.

With its new infrastructure in place, Vital Energi is free to focus on innovation. For example, they can take readings from smart meters in homes, analyze the data, and quickly produce reports that allow the company to see which meters are not functioning and report the faults back to the meter manufacturers. From the residents’ point of view, this predictive failure model enables them to save even more on their energy bills. From Vital Energi’s view, it’s a new tool to leverage even greater savings for clients.

With its new solution, Vital Energi has seen:

• Reduction of time required generating business critical reports from 6 to 12 hours to less than 30 minutes
• Much faster performance
• Cost-effective and secure cloud storage for backup and archiving
• Simplified management that lifts the operational burden from the IT team
• Support that understands the business

Case study and video