A storage platform today must deliver high performance, ultra-low latency, and storage density. Organizations that don’t have such a solution are at a severe disadvantage, but that’s not the case anymore for the manager of platform software at the healthcare company in question. He turned to Pavilion, explaining in his IT Central Station review how the Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform provided the value, flexibility, and performance that his organization required.
The Problem: A lack of performance
The company used to have a solution, implemented by its IT department, consisting of racks of hard drives distributed across multiple sites for backups and replication. “We required a lot more performance,” said the manager. A great deal of data had to be moved from storage to the applications and back. He said, “The applications that were using this data also generate a lot of data. The legacy solution wasn’t designed to do that.”
The use cases that emerged for a new solution involved internal company engineering operations and DevOps. According to the manager, “both our DevOps and engineering operations teams have a lot of compute and data-intensive activities associated with them.”
The Solution: Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform
The manager evaluated several solutions, but most did not scale capacity and performance as easily as Pavilion’s HyperParallel Data Platform. In his view, Pavilion delivers universally unmatched storage with the most performant, scalable, dense, and flexible storage platform on the market. The system leverages a unique, switch-based architecture to create a multi-controller solution that delivers an effective combination of high performance, ultra-low latency, and storage density.
Strong Performance and Density
Pavilion gave the manager the added performance he wanted. He said, “Performance-wise, this product is faster than pretty much anything we've seen.” He also finds it valuable that his team can scale the capacity and the performance independently.
The density of the Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform is much higher than other solutions the manager evaluated. He remarked, “We can basically store the entire company's data inside of one unit, when the unit is properly configured. As it is now, it's equivalent to replacing three or four racks of equipment. The density is incredibly high.”
In addition, since Pavilion’s solution is enterprise-class storage, it has provided flexibility in storage operations, allowing the manager to allocate capacity however he wants. He elaborated, noting, “It uses thin provisioning, which is convenient for us, and all sorts of other enterprise features that come with it that we haven't used quite yet. But we can imagine we'll be taking advantage of them as the usage against the unit rises,” he said.
Efficiency and Cost Savings
The healthcare company has reduced the amount of work required for storage management. The manager explained, “Now, we need very few people to administer the entire company using Pavilion. We can basically have one person manage all of the company's engineering data.”
He also pointed out the cost they’re saving in engineering time spent: “Where we may have had to spend a lot more time administering storage and IT equipment, we now have to spend much less time doing it, even though the headcount dedicated to IT is the same. Basically, opportunity costs have improved dramatically, as we've been able to assign staff to more value-added tasks.”
He added that the company probably had three people spending 25% to 50% of their time doing related activities, whereas now, they have one person spending perhaps 10% of their time.
Easy Setup and Implementation Process
The manager reports that the setup was very straightforward. He remarked, “Everything was running within one or two days. This included bringing the unit up and having everything configured. Most of the time was spent applying the software updates. Once that was complete, it came right up, and we put it online.” He further shared that no issues arose during deployment, as Pavilion trained his team well and everything came up as advertised.
Proactive Customer Support
For the manager and his team, all agree that Pavilion’s service support has been incredibly proactive and responsive because the unit is monitored by their service center. He commented, “Whenever we have accidentally misconfigured something, the service organization has automatically been notified of that. In these cases, they've gotten back to us within 20 minutes to inquire about what's going on. At that point, we've realized our mistake, and we've been very happy with that.”
To learn more about what IT Central Station members think about the Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform platform, visit IT Central Station here.
Guest Blog by IT Central Station.