Johannesburg, 04 Aug 2016
"SimpliVity is convergence 'on steroids'; the built-in data protection helps with risk mitigation. Its single pane management simplifies infrastructure monitoring and management. Furthermore, the SimpliVity solution provided us with disaster recovery and an off-site replication solution instantly, which was non-existent at that stage."
Introduction
The Namibia Institute of Pathology provides medical lab services to health facilities throughout Namibia. It's the largest diagnostic pathology service provider in the country, with more than 450 employees and 40 labs. Since 2000, it has offered testing and disease monitoring services for private and public health sectors. Until it implemented SimpliVity, the organisation outsourced all of its IT.
Business challenge: infrastructure modernisation, consolidation and disaster recovery
The Namibia Institute of Pathology (NIP) decided it was time to bring all of its IT operations in-house to gain better management and control. It had been using physical servers, with storage associated to each, and relying on tape backups. NIP didn't have any disaster recovery capabilities. It did have multiple sites and the need for modernisation, consolidation, data protection, high availability, and of course, disaster recovery.
Choosing SimpliVity
NIP wanted a data centre in a box solution that would simplify its IT environment. The IT team at the institute, led by Valerie Garises, Chief Technology Officer, was essentially starting with a greenfield environment. For the previous eight years, the institute had outsourced all IT to a reseller and services provider.
This company had used SimpliVity technology to run NIP's systems, including core business applications, so it was a logical choice to move to SimpliVity in-house.
NIP also looked at other technologies, but found SimpliVity's proposition very compelling. SimpliVity's hyperconverged infrastructure solution was the only one that could offer all the features NIP needed, such as disaster recovery, data protection, and high availability.
The main criteria for NIP's team was simplified IT. It needed migration from outsourced to in-house IT that could be done without additional skills and resources the organisation didn't have. It didn't have the budget that would be needed to get those skills through outside specialists and consultants, but it had to find a solution that could accomplish its goals.
SimpliVity solution
"SimpliVity is a robust, resilient, and reliable technology," Garises said. NIP has achieved an astounding 94.1:1 data efficiency ratio with SimpliVity. It has also consolidated down from 40U to 6U of rack space.
SimpliVity provides a scalable, modular building block of x86 resources that delivers all the functionality of traditional IT infrastructure - including hypervisor, compute, storage, and data protection functions - in a single device, with a unified administrative interface. NIP has 32 virtual machines running in its environment, with just under 35TB of VM data. NIP has almost 4PB of backup data being stored, and now maintains one production and one disaster recovery site. SimpliVity nodes are located at both sites for fast, simple, full backups and replications.
The NIP IT team has minimised risk without increasing opex with SimpliVity, and it also appreciates the ease of management that SimpliVity brings with vCenter-based global unified management. In addition, it has built a private cloud to host sensitive data using SimpliVity. "We consolidated 11 physical servers from different locations onto three SimpliVity OmniCube nodes in one data centre, which brought great savings in terms of rack space," Garises added.
The institute also made sure to size its new environment for growth. NIP is expanding and will move to another building in the next year. With SimpliVity as the infrastructure base, it can continue to scale as needed and undertake new projects, such as a possible VDI deployment.
The Namibia Institute of Pathology moved into an extremely modern data centre infrastructure when it adopted SimpliVity to move its IT in-house. It's gained huge efficiency and brand new DR, backup and single pane management.
For more information, visit: www.simplivity.com.
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