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Published on: April 01, 2009
Type of content: CASE STUDY
Format: Unknown
Length: 17 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
One of the world's leading global financial institutions (GFI), distressed by the economic downturn and challenged with increasing shareholder value, was looking for ways to optimize its data center strategy. In particular, the GFI was looking for a strategic partner offering long term support for a cross platform storage consolidation and reclamation strategy that involved nearly 2,000 servers and 76 EMC frames located in multiple regions around the world.

The GFI contracted with Hitachi Data Systems for a two-phase technology refresh as part of the Storage Reclamation Service. The client's storage challenges included underutilized storage capacity, allocated but unused storage and fragmented storage. Previous time consuming, host-based migration strategies had proved unsuccessful, but through virtualization, thin provisioning with Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning software and a managed residency engagement, the GFI's data migrations have been completed online and transparently, without any user disruption. The Hitachi technology refresh required significantly less application downtime and fewer server reboots, as well as limited involvement by client system administrators and SAN teams. Also, Hitachi Data Systems was able to reclaim stranded capacity through consolidation and thin provisioning.

Hitachi Data Systems was able to help the GFI save US$4 million through a 40 percent to 60 percent reduction of physical storage, 40 percent reduction of environmental requirements, 40 percent reduction of real estate needs, and significantly reduced maintenance and operational costs.