Upgrade storage infrastructure for Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery and VDI

Improving quality of service has the dual value of optimizing back-office work and defining a quality standard for customers. In a digital transformation viewpoint for the financial services sector, for example in a bank, this means reducing the average time of access to data, even during Disaster Recovery.

The organization that chose Lutech for a storage upgrade project is a fast and flexible commercial bank, which focuses on long-term relationships with its clients and handles critical information and data typical of the finance and banking sector.

The sensitivity of the data at stake is, of course, supported by a redundant storage infrastructure that, over the years, has done its job very well. To ensure even more efficient business continuity in the event of disaster recovery, the client chose to adapt the infrastructure to the latest technologies. In particular, the situation presented two server rooms in which the Business Continuity structure is located. In the event of issues with one of these, the other one cuts in immediately, with no interruption in service.

Already a NetApp customer, the company could count on a MetroCluster storage infrastructure that included an asynchronous copy of the services at a remote location for disaster recovery. In particular, there were two NetApp FAS3240 units with NFS protocol capable of ensuring fast intervention, with no interruption in service, and better space management.

NetApp technology served as an excellent basis for meeting the bank’s new needs. The same could be said of the service provided by Lutech’s team.

Lutech therefore specified an upgrade of the existing solution: updating to the latest technologies with the introduction of two All Flash NetApp AFF8040 with SSD disks (totaling 58TB). In practice, the bank’s IT managers would only see one storage space shared between two server rooms for customer services business continuity, including the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment.

In addition to the high performance and competitive price, the client benefited from the advantages of adopting an All Flash solution. Now, the disk space is much better optimized than with the previous solution: this means that, for the same number of terabytes, the availability is significantly greater – almost 50% more – and even the access speed is undeniably higher.

As previously mentioned, VDI architecture was implemented on the infrastructure, with 50 virtual machines with client operating system, in order to have virtual machines ready to step in at any time in disaster recovery mode.

The project continued in the area of infrastructure backup, with the existing FAS system and the possibility to use NetApp’s native functionalities in the future to take consistent snapshots of data with a consequent reduction in backup and restore times.

Ultimately, a project to upgrade an existing valid storage infrastructure such as NetApp, to accompany a successful and well-run services partnership, which has led to an optimization of the space occupied, greater security in emergency procedures, and a significant reduction in access time.

Ultimately, a project to upgrade an already valid storage infrastructure such as NetApp, to accompany a successful and well-run partnership on services, which has led to an optimisation of the space occupied, greater security in emergency procedures and a significant reduction in access time.