UTi Pharma, the specialised pharmaceutical logistics arm of UTi, has successfully completed the rollout of an optimised enterprise storage solution through the expertise of Shoden Data Systems.
According to Gary du Bois, Technology Architect at UTi Pharma, UTi Pharma has developed its business hand-in-hand with many of today's leading pharmaceutical companies, providing them - and millions of patients - with value for money and reliable access to healthcare products. The company stocks over 2 000 product lines.
“With the dramatic growth that UTi Pharma experienced in South Africa following the acquisition of International Healthcare Distributors in 2004, the organisation needed to improve its internal IT systems - particularly with regards to data storage,” Du Bois explains.
When the initial engagement between UTi Pharma and Shoden took place in 2008, UTi was running legacy storage technology based on simple modular disk systems supplied by Sun Microsystems.
“Although the technology in place had sufficed in terms of their historical business requirements, recent changes in the industry and the business resulted in additional pressure being placed on an already aged technology infrastructure,” Du Bois says.
The engagement with UTi Pharma lead to the pharmaceutical company purchasing the Hitachi Data Systems Universal Storage Platform VM (USP-VM) based on the reliability, availability and scalability that this enterprise storage technology offers.
“The Hitachi USP-VM blends enterprise-class functionality with a smaller footprint to meet the business needs of entry-level enterprises and fast growing mid-sized organisations, while supporting distributed or departmental applications in large enterprises,” explains Adrian Wood, Manager: Business Development at Shoden.
“Medium-sized organisations can enjoy the same benefits as large enterprises in deploying and managing their storage infrastructure in a way that was previously not possible.
“The USP-VM solution delivers a proven and innovative enterprise-based cache centric architecture, which allows for controller-based virtualisation, logical partitioning, synchronous and asynchronous journal-based replication and many other features for open systems and mainframe environments in a rack-mounted storage services platform,” he adds.
Combined with the feature-rich capabilities, UTi Pharma believed that this technology would significantly outperform the existing infrastructure while providing an enterprise storage platform that would be flexible to meet the changing business requirements.
However, over a year later, the dynamic nature of the pharmaceutical industry resulted in a new requirement for UTi Pharma to enhance its storage technology so as to align with the business's organic growth and new projects.
“The initial investment made into the USP-VM technology by UTi Pharma was for its mission-critical Solaris applications. At the time, the Microsoft Windows environment was deemed to be less critical to the business and therefore the existing infrastructure on which it resided sufficed,” Wood says.
“However, as with many organisations,” he continues, “the role of Microsoft-based applications within the organisation became more critical.
“In order to manage the growth of the Microsoft environment, UTi Pharma invested in server virtualisation technology from VMware, which would help them realise higher efficiencies in server resource utilisation and simplified management of the server landscape, ultimately resulting in cost savings and reduced total cost of ownership.”
Although server virtualisation would offer greater efficiencies through consolidation and higher utilisation, UTi Pharma required that its Microsoft and VMware platforms operate on the relevant storage tier, which would allow for growth and sufficient performance without impacting on the mission-critical Solaris environment.
Shoden was subsequently approached and briefed to assist with a storage solution that would complement the benefits offered by VMware, through a cost-effective, dynamic tiered storage solution.
As part of the assessment process, Shoden made extensive use of Hitachi's storage economics methodology, which aims to redefine the way organisations measure the cost of storage.
At Hitachi Data Systems, storage economics is a suite of methodologies, tools, services and sales tactics that help customers identify the total cost of storage ownership and provide strategies to help customers reduce ongoing costs.
“It became evident that, although UTi Pharma was aware of which applications required additional or less storage performance, it did not have the ability to easily change its configurations without having to resort to traditional storage practices where capacity was assigned on the basis of connectivity between the host application and available storage capacity,” Wood says.
“Another challenge that UTi Pharma faced was the complexities associated with allocating storage whilst ensuring that this allocation did not impact on any of the critical systems.
“The business was not always aware of the capacity requirements, and the storage administrators would over-allocate to ensure that there was sufficient capacity for growth within the application,” he adds.
Shoden conducted a meticulous interview and assessment process, which revealed that there was definite potential to reclaim valuable capacity by moving away from the traditional way of allocating storage and adopting a new methodology of utilising the storage that was already in place together with a tiered approach to data storage.
Shoden - together with UTi Pharma's technical staff - implemented a three-tier storage solution, whereby data can be stored on different performance and cost tiers dependant on the business's requirements.
Additionally, the Hitachi Tuning Manager (HTM) software was implemented, which gave UTi Pharma total visibility from end-to-end of the performance, capacity and availability of each application, and will assist with any future storage, switching or server purchasing decisions.
Not only did UTi Pharma now have three tiers of storage, but also the ability to seamlessly migrate data between these tiers with no impact to any of the business applications.
This provided the business with the most cost-effective storage solution, and also removed previous problems experienced when the storage administrators had to “over cater” for performance and capacity in the event of an application requiring additional performance, either through growth or other changes.
Allocating storage without having any knowledge of the growth requirements is no longer a challenge for UTi Pharma. With the implementation of Hitachi's Thin Provisioning, UTi Pharma's storage administrators are now able to allocate only their immediate requirements, and the software will allow the storage allocation to grow as required.
“Admittedly,” Du Bois says, “the resultant capital expenditure of the revamp was much higher than the initial simple expansion of storage resources, but the value proposition that Shoden was able to provide, in terms of reducing overall running costs over the coming years - far outweighed this challenge.
“The efficiency benefits, coupled with predictable running costs - provided by Hitachi's Storage Economics - and the new flexibility to grow the organisation's systems with minimal downtime, have met and exceeded the expectations of UTi Pharma,” he concludes.
Share