NaviSite increases storage reliability, performance and efficiency with IBM XIV Storage System

Overview

For application and hosting service providers like NaviSite, in Andover, Massachusetts, superior storage solutions contribute directly to the bottom line. NaviSite’s 700 employees, working at sites in the U.S., the U.K. and India, support a wide range of applications and services. From hosting, managed services and custom development to support for enterprise applications, NaviSite relies on back-end storage to deliver the reliability and performance that its more than 1,300 customers expect.

“In a sense, our IT infrastructure is our product,” says Mark Clayman, senior vice president of hosting services for NaviSite. “By building a best-in-class delivery platform—storage, service, networking devices and processes and tools—we can offer a level of technology and expertise that most customers can’t easily develop internally.”

Explosive data growth results in inefficiencies and high costs

Inefficiencies in the company’s existing storage area network were driving up costs and the time required to keep customers up and running. “In recent years, rich media and video content, larger graphics and regulatory concerns have driven exponential growth in demand for disk space,” explains Clayman. “Customers want more data protected, and they want to be able to access older data more efficiently.”

Administration time to manage storage increased in lockstep with demand, and the physical limitations of the company’s infrastructure began to impact customers. “As we watched storage move from a small component of our pricing model to a much larger component, we knew it was time to assess our options,” explains Peter Salamanca, senior director of systems engineering and network engineering.

Performance and reliability deliver competitive advantage

NaviSite ultimately chose a new option in enterprise-class storage from IBM: the IBM XIV Storage System. The XIV system offers easy manageability and advanced features for superior flexibility and scalability. Based on a grid array of standard hardware components combined with powerful software, the IBM XIV Storage System provides a high level of consistent performance without data hot spots. The unique architecture also offers grid-based rebuild technology, providing high redundancy.

Says Clayman, “The IBM XIV Storage System allows us to provide a highly reliable, highly performing platform to our customers that should help NaviSite gain an advantage over its competitors.”

As data is written across multiple disks, the IBM XIV Storage System can seamlessly protect data without interrupting service. “We’ve had only two drive failures since we implemented the new storage system,” says Salamanca. “Within three or four minutes the data on those disks was redistributed, with zero impact on our clients—we couldn’t believe it. The system just performs very consistently in terms of availability and performance.”

Easy manageability optimizes resources

The IBM XIV Storage System comes with a graphical interface and powerful toolsets as part of its standard offering—which help drastically reduce storage maintenance time. “The incredibly intuitive interface has made it easy to train IT staff unfamiliar with storage,” says Clayman. “Now staff in London and New Delhi can work on storage without involving the U.S. team, so we can provide better service around the clock.”

Combined with the high reliability of the IBM XIV Storage System, this manageability means testing and development have little effect on NaviSite customers. Says Salamanca, “We can replace production components while customers are working. We can add storage without bringing down the rest of the unit. We are able to patch and support IBM XIV without having any impact on availability or performance. We work fewer late nights and weekends, and that’s great for the bottom line—and peace of mind.”

Speed of provisioning leads to significant time savings

The IBM XIV Storage System has made deployment simple, saving NaviSite considerable time in setting up new customer services. The system interacts easily with the company’s virtualized VMware environment, allowing storage to be provisioned for new servers in minutes. “The combination of virtualization and IBM XIV storage has reduced deployment time from as much as 48 hours to a mere 3 to 6 hours. It takes us just 5 to 10 minutes to create a volume and assign it to an existing server,” says Salamanca. “That kind of time savings equates to a tremendous gain in efficiency for our IT team.”

NaviSite sees green data center and lower TCO in its future

Clayman reports that developing a more consolidated environment based on the IBM XIV Storage System could allow NaviSite to develop a greener data center and lower the overall cost of its storage infrastructure. “Green technologies are a huge component of NaviSite,” he says. “IBM XIV storage is giving us greater power densities, reducing the environmental and overall operational cost of delivering the same amount of storage.

“IBM XIV offers the right blend of cost, features and functionality, and so has become a key component to our environment and the services we deliver,” he continues. “As we deploy more XIV systems across our data centers, we hope to gain better efficiencies and further reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) over time—passing those savings on to our customers.”