Unified storage provides fast access to customer simulations

The Diversus Group is a small business providing professional and advisory services to customers needing data storage and management services with 80% of its staff being remote users. Its headquarters and IT infrastructure is based in Canberra, and consultants work in Sydney and Melbourne.

Being able to run a testbed with storage simulation requires high levels of data transfer, as well as the need for immediate access to information. Diversus Group’s challenge was to be able to offer customers reliable, accurate simulations of their proposed storage environments in real time, without the risk of losing information or slowing data transfer.

Aaron Pickering, chief technologist for Diversus Group, says, “From the outset, we intended to grow our business quickly, so we knew the storage infrastructure we chose had to be robust enough to meet the challenge.

“In the small business environment, especially a consultancy, cash is king and information is critical. So if you’re at the office dealing with IT issues rather than in front of customers, you’re losing money. If your data storage system fails and you lose information, it can be a fatal blow to the business.

“We wanted a back-end system that didn’t require a full-time IT staff member and would give us the flexibility to run our business remotely. We needed an efficient, consistent, streamlined storage environment that we could use to not only simulate customer situations in real time, in an affordable package, but also house all of our critical business data.”

Diversus Group chose to partner with NetApp for its storage requirements implementing a storage system based on the NetApp FAS2000 unified storage architecture. The FAS2000 is a scalable system designed for companies that have complex, growing data environments in dispersed or remote locations.

Pickering says, “Our consultants are talking to customers every day about the benefits and breakthroughs NetApp storage systems can bring to their businesses. So it’s critical that our own NetApp system is robust, reliable and fast. If it weren’t, we couldn’t speak to customers with true passion about the products.

“Scalability is very important, considering the rate at which our business has grown and the speed at which system use is increasing. The NetApp architecture we’ve implemented is highly scalable and allows us to do more with less.”

The solution also included several NetApp SnapManager applications to automate backup processes for key applications, including: SnapManager for Microsoft Exchange, SnapManager for SharePoint, SnapManager for SQL Server and SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure.

“In the three years since we began, we’ve only had to recover data twice. Both times, we’ve gained full data recovery within minutes using the NetApp SnapManager software,” says Pickering.

“A key element of our value-add as a consultancy is that we can provide information fast, so spending long periods recovering data is not an option. SnapManager gives us the confidence that we will be able to recover our data, no matter what.

“With the technology we’ve implemented in our business, we now have a very low-administration, low-overhead, reliable, scalable, high-performance system that requires no more than an hour of interaction each week,” Pickering says. “For example, adding Riverbed applications to the NetApp implementation has allowed us to save about 80% of bandwidth.

“It means, as a small business, we don’t need to have a dedicated IT resource. The system provides us with email alerts if there’s an issue, so we don’t have to pay someone to sit in the office and maintain it.”

The major benefits can be summed as 80% bandwidth saving, minimal maintenance/management required, consistently above 65% storage utilisation and a consistently positive remote user experience.