The customer, a higher education provider located in London employing more than 1,500 staff and catering to just under 20,000 students, operates across three campuses. The university already had a solution in place across all sites that provided them with block and files storage.
The Business Challenge
As part of its modernisation strategy, the customer was looking to upgrade its virtualised environments to the latest version of Hypervisor, however, some of the existing hardware in place was not compatible with vendor-supported hardware and needed to be upgraded before any further work was carried out.
As part of the proposed storage solution, the customer benefitted from existing HPE Server hardware and InfoSight Platform which would provide them with an advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning platform to protect their infrastructure and maximise uptime, giving them peace of mind that all of their storage and server hardware was being monitored proactively, thus preventing issues before any possible impact. This platform would also ensure upgrades were relevant to the customer and proven prior to deployment.
This AI and machine learning platform would not only minimise the impact of any future issues but would ensure upgrades were relevant to the University and proven prior to deployment. It would also provide the University with the capability to monitor from the hardware right through to the VMware environment.
In addition to the introduction of HPE InfoSight to the customer environment, Daisy Professional Services and the Project Management team were deployed to plan and assist with the hardware deployment and migration process to ensure a minimised the risk of downtime to the students and staff during the integration of the new environment and the virtual server migration.
The project started in November 2020 and was completed by January 2021. The total contract value stands at £550K.
The Solution
Daisy proposed and installed three HPE All Flash Nimble Arrays across the three customer sites. Each of these storage arrays were to be integrated with a Veeam Backup and Recovery application to allow the customer to back up their virtualised environment. Daisy worked in collaboration with the HPE Service Delivery teams to ensure that the kit was delivered and installed to HPE’s best practices.
Daisy Pre-sales and Professional Services were also deployed to agree a design for the storage solution, this was consequently installed as part of a managed project which included customer acceptance testing, knowledge transfer and a data transfer methodology proof of concept. Formal training was also provided to some members of the customer’s own IT team. In addition, Daisy carried out a proof of concept virtual server migration programme to demonstrate the migration process, that then allowed the university to migrate the remaining virtualised estate.
Benefits and Results
As a result of deploying the HPE Nimble Storage Solution, the customer now has a more resilient solution and utilises the benefits of AI and Machine Learning that was introduced with the HPE InfoSight product. This is a huge part of why HPE offer 99.9999% availability on the Nimble storage arrays by predicting and preventing issues before they occur using their experience of issues that have been experienced elsewhere in the world. The solution also blocks potential issues with upgrade processes and ensures that everything is performing efficiently all the way up from the hardware to the virtualised environment.
As is the case with many higher education institutions, ESG is always a consideration and with the introduction of the all-flash storage arrays, the customer was able to benefit from substantial power and cooling savings which would go some way to reducing its carbon footprint.
