Can’t afford to have your systems go down? INFINIDAT provides the reliability you need
One of my favourite things about being new to the INFINIDAT team is discovering the numerous and different customer stories. There’s nothing quite like hearing the voice of the customer – particularly if it’s about how we helped them do things better or smarter, and the impact this has on their own customer service.
One such story is how INFINIDAT helped Brightsolid improve the reliability of their own service offering. Read a summary here – or just scroll down further to watch the video.
As a major data centre and core infrastructure player for four critical sectors – energy, health, government and financial – Scotland-based Brightsolid simply can’t afford to have their systems go down.
“One of the challenges of our industry as a whole is that it operates to ‘four nines’ as a level of excellence,” said Brightsolid’s CEO Richard Hicks. “That means [systems] could be down for 30 seconds a month. But that’s not acceptable when it comes to data centre, clouds and the sort of stuff we are doing.”
With their previous storage system having reliability and controller update issues, Brightsolid’s senior systems engineer James Harper was tasked with finding a new storage system.
“I did a big spreadsheet of about 30 different systems comparing all the features, the pricing and requirements, and comparing them against that,” Mr Harper said. “INFINIDAT came out as the best option for us for price and performance for this tier of storage.”
INFINIDAT provides reliability and support
What Brightsolid wanted was a storage system with an error risk of just 1 in 6.2 million – with that error, if it eventuated, being immaterial to the customer. They found this with INFINIDAT.
“We want speed of operation in order to do things quickly on the box,” said Mr Harper. “INFINIDAT has REST APIs, which makes things a lot quicker for us. We can script stuff, we can push it out. Volumes created within seconds.”
Mr Harper commented the InfiniMetrics tool for viewing system performance is very important as well. “They’ve given us really good insight into the system. The three active nodes mean you can do firmware updates, bring a node down while all the IOs are still flowing.”
The dual parity of the system, and the way drives can be rebuilt very quickly is another plus. “Just the architecture of the whole system being very reliable is a key aspect for us,” he said.
Mr Harper notes that INFINIDAT’s support is also very good. “They’re very responsive and a lot of times when you raise a ticket with them, you’ll notice them logging into the system within five minutes. They’re very knowledgeable guys, you can see they’ve spent a lot of time in this industry.”
INFINIDAT customer satisfaction leads to Brightsolid customer satisfaction
Mr Harper said their own customers have commented on the changes they’ve noticed since Brightsolid started working with INFINIDAT. “They’re very happy with the system. They’ve noticed a big improvement in the snappiness of their applications, which is great,” he said.
Mr Hicks said INFINIDAT helps Brightsolid provide their customers with technical innovation and personal service. “It means that when one of our customers said, ‘How long will it take you to switch on that extra storage we forgot to tell you about?’, we can say, ‘Don’t panic. We’ll just switch it on’,” he said.
And for Mr Hicks, the number one outcome of working with INFINIDAT is its reliability.
“From a personal service perspective, I have never had to call one of our customers and say, ‘I am terribly sorry I have in any way corrupted your data, lost any of your data, or had to go to a backup ’ in two years of operating INFINIDAT. And that is truly staggering,” he said.
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Like to know more? Watch the full video here, or get in touch with me directly to arrange a demonstration.