A state-owned insurance company has implemented a unified storage solution provided by Huawei to gain a performance boost and price advantage over its previous system. Delivered by Altech Collab, the Huawei specialist division within Bytes Systems Integration, the Huawei OceanStor S5500T is installed as the primary storage solution for the Sasria SOC Limited (Sasria).
Formed in 1979, Sasria provides insurance cover for special risks (such as loss through strike action, terrorism and riots) not covered by general insurance.
Sasria IT Manager Ivan Scodeggio reveals that the increasing demand on data availability and storage capacity, performance and reliability of the storage platform on which the data resides is crucial. The organisation is always looking to improve performance and drive down costs.
“After assessing Huawei’s international footprint and identifying existing high profile companies already utilising Huawei’s SAN solution, I was confident that not only would the Huawei solution provide for our requirements, but would be cost effective as well,” he says.
Caroline Beswick, practice manager at Altech Collab, says the OceanStor S5500T provides converged architecture, protocols and platforms. “This high-performance, low cost solution is designed for OLTP/OLAP databases, high performance computing (HPC), digital media, internet-based operations, central storage, backup, disaster recovery, and data migration.”
The OceanStor S5500T system is a mid-range unified storage system designed for meeting requirements on high-speed data access, enhanced availability, high utilisation, energy-savings, and ease-of-use.
Its implementation at Sasria is among the growing number of deployments of Huawei storage solutions in South Africa, she confirms. “As a proven storage solutions vendor internationally, capable of achieving the performance demanded by business at considerably lower cost, we expect many more Huawei implementations to follow,” Beswick adds.
Scodeggio says the implementation of the solution was handled smoothly by Altech Collab and Bytes SI, with a staggered data migration (due to operational demand) accompanied by exhaustive testing throughout the process. “This ensured zero downtime, no errors and no loss of data. There was also no impact on our customers throughout the process as the implementation was conducted outside of business hours,” he confirms.
The anticipated advantage of reduced cost without performance sacrifice has been achieved, says Scodeggio. “The solution Huawei has delivered is more affordable and has integrated seamlessly with our existing virtualisation platform.”
Such is the success of the deployment that the agency is considering the implementation of a similar solution backed by Huawei storage technologies to meet additional business requirements, Scodeggio adds.