City of Coquitlam Implements HDS Storage Virtualization

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation announced that the City of Coquitlam in British Columbia has implemented the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM to revamp its storage area network (SAN) and include controller-based storage virtualization. The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM provides seamless data movement capabilities, exceptional reliability and a user-friendly interface, ensuring Coquitlam delivers optimal service levels with minimal downtime, and is well prepared for future growth.

The City of Coquitlam’s ICT department supports 15 buildings across three city campuses that serve 125,000 citizens, diverse businesses and over 1,000 city employees. A progressive community that is recognized as a leader when it comes to utilizing high technology, Coquitlam offers 24/7 online services. The City’s QNet, one of the first city-owned optical fibre leasing companies in North America, delivers carrier-grade fibre optic network access to residents and businesses within Coquitlam and provides the ICT department with the ability to distribute storage systems across town in two city-owned data centres. Faced with significant increases in city services, applications and database requirements, Coquitlam turned to Hitachi Data Systems to address a growing need for increased storage performance, scalability and manageability.

“While data storage was growing, the staff to manage it wasn’t. We had to find a way to reliably and cost-effectively manage storage in a way that would improve our services and enable us to capitalize on the latest technology available so that we could continue to offer new services and capabilities online,” says Darren Browett, Technical Services Manager for the City of Coquitlam. “During our evaluation, we considered criteria such as cost-to-value, quality and scope of technology, support infrastructure, and ease of use. The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM scored the highest in these areas, and also offers compelling features such as controller-based virtualization and thin provisioning.“

The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM unifies controller-based storage virtualization, dynamic provisioning, universal replication and nondisruptive migration capabilities through an intelligent platform that manages everything virtualized behind it. It is the first external storage virtualization platform certified to operate with VMware ESX and VMware virtual infrastructures, thereby enhancing secure and flexible alignment between host environments and storage platforms.

“Canadian customers are looking beyond maximizing their capacity per dollar investment,” says Dave Pearson, IDC Enterprise Storage Analyst. “Increasingly, they are coming to the realization that maintaining, provisioning, migrating and upgrading their storage solutions are the areas in which they can best attack costs.  Both the time and expertise required to maintain disparate storage solutions, especially in a highly virtualized environment, can be overwhelming, and these are areas in which USP VM has demonstrated value.”

The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM provides the rich functionality of the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V in a rack-mounted and modular form factor at a price point that is attractive to both midrange and enterprise businesses.

“The Hitachi Universal Storage Platform VM blends enterprise-class functionality with a smaller footprint to meet the business needs of fast growing organizations such as the City of Coquitlam,” said Barry Morrison, Regional Vice President, Hitachi Data Systems Canada. “Now, with the flexibility offered by the Universal Storage Platform VM, Coquitlam can grow its services by deploying and managing its storage infrastructure in a  completely new and effective way.”

Compugen, Inc., a Hitachi Data Systems TrueNorth Gold Partner, was brought in to help with integration, virtualization and migration to the Universal Storage Platform VM, and to configure new and existing switches in the SAN fabric.

“Working with Hitachi Data Systems and Compugen is like having a unified support infrastructure as part of our team. They have extensive product knowledge and are open to helping us run and configure systems in ways that work best for our specific environment,” adds Browett.