Seamless storage virtualisation is a game changer

Seccom Global is a Sydney-based company that offers cybersecurity consultancy and advisory services, digital transformation and managed services. The firm began in a garage in Baulkham Hills in 2003 and has since opened an office in Melbourne, and now serves 180 customers in more than 20 countries.

Updating storage infrastructure has been an ongoing focus for Seccom Global. However, due to the company’s recent growth, it needed to reassess its infrastructure, which provided an opportunity to explore new technologies and saw it review an emerging virtualised data management technology called ioFABRIC.

Seccom Global Managing Director Michael Demery, said the decision to take on emerging technologies is never taken lightly, but innovation is not about following the pack.

“Our business is in a period of explosive growth, so we had to approach the challenge of storage in a more creative way, and part of that was exploring new and emerging technologies,” he said.

Prior to ioFABRIC, Seccom Global was spending big on traditional storage products that didn’t suit its heavily virtualised environments. As a result, Demery and his team realised they needed to make the inevitable transition to data virtualisation to drive an even stronger competitive advantage for their customers.

ioFABRIC proved to be an ideal solution as it enables any storage to be connected to Seccom Global’s existing infrastructure, creating a single storage pool that is hardware agnostic. Vendors can no longer lock the company into their storage hardware.

“ioFABRIC enabled us to do to our storage what VMware did to our servers,” said Demery. “ioFABRIC virtualises storage — just as VMware virtualises servers. The technology is a game changer.”

Through the introduction of ioFABRIC, Seccom Global can utilise previously unused storage in less demanding roles, such as holding old and inactive data. ioFABRIC’s ability to self-heal data on failed storage devices to other available storage enables the company to use storage until it truly fails or becomes uneconomical.

“We may never purchase another SAN, NAS or dedicated storage array thanks to ioFABRIC,” said Demery.

Without user intervention, ioFABRIC moves hot data to RAM, warm data to SSD/flash and inactive data flows to the lowest-cost disks. All storage is managed from a single dashboard, regardless of storage vendor, make or model — which is invaluable, as network admins can instantly see any issues at a glance, even from a smartphone.

Performance is achieved simply by setting the IOPS or latency required by an application, and everything else is fully automated. Data moves to where it needs to be in order to deliver the performance, capacity and protection objectives required by the application workload.

“As big data, analytics and artificial intelligence become increasingly valuable, our customers are looking more to insights and analytics as the real value-add from technology purchases,” added Demery.

“With the introduction of ioFABRIC to the Seccom Global cybersecurity ecosystem, we are uniquely placed to address the challenges that plague technology professionals every day.”