GRZ IT Center established that reducing the manual administration effort was a key opportunity for cost reduction: Administrators were tasked with managing around 2,000 virtual servers and 1,000 VMware virtualized desktops. So, the company focused its attention on the automation of its VMware environments, aiming to enable more efficient operations and reduce workload.
To simplify the landscape, the team chose to consolidate its VMware land scapes to just two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G800 models with hybrid flash, in combination with 96 Hitachi Compute Blade 500 servers.
Storage is virtualized using Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS), with automatic storage tiering provided by Hitachi Dynamic Tiering software. This solution shifts frequently accessed data to the fastest storage and rarely used data to more economical storage. Additionally, GRZ IT Center saves time and money by being able to easily extend the solution in predefined steps with components that come prebuilt and ready to install, allowing the company to increase capacity and performance flexibly, as needed.
For business continuity, GRZ IT Center deployed SVOS’s global-active device. If one of the two storage systems is knocked out of action, the global-active device ensures continuous service with no business interruption.
The Hitachi Vantara Global Services Solutions team manages the solution up to the virtualization layer, releasing GRZ IT Center’s in-house IT team from many time-consuming routine-management tasks.
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