Credit and Investments Ombudsman of Australia transforms data centre with SimpliVity OmniCube

The Credit and Investments Ombudsman (CIO) was established in 2003 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia. CIO offers consumers an accessible, independent and fair external dispute resolution service, approved by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

With the growing success of its services, CIO required a new data platform. CIO had been running all applications on physical servers, and had not invested in virtualisation. CIO had to manage a data centre of ageing hardware and software, consisting of general purpose servers with built-in storage that took up multiple racks in the data centre. The infrastructure was complex, running Microsoft Small Business Server and other database servers dedicated to running specific applications such as databases, email, and accounting applications.

To manage risk and protect data, CIO used Symantec Backup Exec for backup and data protection. The organisation performed full backups weekly and nightly incremental backups onto portable drives. While this was viable for CIO’s early growth phase, a new strategy was needed to improve data availability and enable better off-site data protection and disaster recovery.

Like most midmarket businesses which have less than 50TB of storage, CIO only had approximately 2.5TB of storage, but needed to plan for growth. The organisation also wanted to improve its risk profile by establishing a disaster recovery site, and add testing and development capabilities to improve agility.

CIO had a small IT team, and required a drastic simplification and upgrade to their data centre. Matt Grech, IT Manager at CIO, started evaluating solutions that would meet the requirements for application delivery, data centre simplification, improved backup/restore, enhanced reliability and data centre optimisation. Grech knew about the efficiency gains provided by VMware virtualisation, and saw it as a perfect opportunity to look for a solution that would reduce their total cost of operation.

Through partner The IT Consultancy Group, Grech learned about SimpliVity OmniCube, a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that provides a globally-federated, hyperconverged IT infrastructure platform that combines eight to 12 core data centre functions, including VMware hypervisor, compute, solid state drive (SSD, also known as flash) and hard disk drive storage, network switching, backup, replication, WAN optimisation, real-time data efficiency, performance acceleration and global unified management in one solution. To address all CIO’s requirements, they chose the space-efficient, 2U OmniCube CN-2200, and two nodes in their primary data centre in Sydney plus a third system in the co-located disaster recovery site.

The OmniCube 2200 not only met CIO’s financial requirements, but also key design requirements including: 

• Refreshing data centre hardware with a solution that enables the flexibility and scalability of virtualisation 
• Providing integrated disaster recovery to resolve the current issues with long recovery times 
• Simpifying management
• Shrinking the infrastructure footprint 

"We just didn’t have the human capital to manage VMware running on a complex storage area network (SAN) with traditional servers,” said Grech when discussing his evaluation of other legacy infrastructures. “We were trying to figure out how to get the most resource-efficient solution from a capex and opex perspective.”

Since deploying OmniCube, CIO has experienced a radical reduction in data centre complexity. After performing a physical to virtual (P2V) migration, CIO replaced multiple servers in their primary data centre with a system that takes up 2U of space within their co-located disaster recovery site. All their mission-critical applications are running on SimpliVity, and performance levels have improved. CIO has achieved 295:1 data efficiency - a figure that is climbing every day; four-fold performance gains as well as a three-fold reduction in rack space

“We’ve not only greatly improved performance, but also reduced our hardware infrastructure foot print and simplified the management of our VMware environment... Report generation is at least three to four times faster now that we are running our line of business apps on SimpliVity,” said Grech. “The migration from physical servers to VMware on OmniCube has significantly improved our customer user experience.” 

The application performance improvement is a result of SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform, which accelerates performance through deduplication, compression and optimisation of all input and output (I/O) in real-time across all virtual machines (VMs). SimpliVity uniquely optimises the I/O path between the applications and their data.

CIO's legacy backup model has been completely replaced with SimpliVity’s native data protection, off-site backup and replication capabilities which are built into OmniCube. Using the policy-based automation included with OmniCube, Grech is backing up all applications including Exchange, SQL databases, web servers, SharePoint and more. Rapid, space efficient backups are stored in the primary data centre and sent efficiently to the off-site DR site. CIO can also rapidly clone or restore VMs for testing and development.

“Recently we had a corruption in one of our main accounting applications, and the staff knew this meant for a recovery process that would take hours to perform and would deliver a recovery point from a few days ago based on the old restore process,” stated Grech. “With SimpliVity from vCenter, I easily restored the full VM of the accounting app in minutes from a copy taken 15 minutes prior to the corruption. The staff was amazed at this new business agility we had enabled.”

CIO now enjoys simplified, streamlined management from within vCenter, fewer hardware pieces to monitor and manage, and exceptional agility and operational efficiency with dataset and VM mobility. When asked if he would recommend SimpliVity to a colleague, Grech replied, “Absolutely.”

"We are delighted to be working with The IT Consultancy Group and the Credit and Investment Ombudsman to deploy a data centre solution that aligns to the flexibility and scalability that their virtual environment requires,” said Scott Morris, SimpliVity Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan. “Not only is SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure much more efficient than their legacy infrastructure, it is also delivering the IT team the flexibility to easily manage their entire data centre infrastructure from within VMware vCenter.”