Industry:
Business Services
The Challenge:
- Existing traditional storage array was reaching capacity limit
- Traditional storage was inflexible and staff intensive
- Ingeus needed to free resources and improve TCO to focus on strategic initiatives
The Solution:
Zadara Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service
Benefits:
- Fast and simple deployment enabled by fully-managed support and ease-of-use features
- Agility goals acheived with storage capacity that seamlessly scales up and down
- Storage costs are reduced, easily reported, and directly tied to specific projects
Company Profile
For over twenty years, Ingeus Europe Limited has been a global provider of people-related services and a key supplier for government work and health programs. Focused on creating strong societies that empower their citizens with the independence, knowledge, and know-how to thrive, Ingeus aspires to be the number one provider of work programs globally.
Ingeus are a global organisation with operations in eleven countries across North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions. Their largest operations are in the UK, where they work alongside more than seventy partner organisations from the public, private and third sector.
For David McPherson, Ingeus’ Global Head of Infrastructure, selecting technologies that delivers the service, agility, and economic flexibility to enable and strengthen Ingeus’ focus on human success is absolutely critical to accelerating program delivery.
The Challenge
The nature of Ingeus’ operations place a premium on providing agile support for key projects by quickly and simply ramping capacity up or down, as circumstances dictate. The existing storage was nearing maximum capacity and did not offer the flexibility Ingeus required.
To expand IT services without impacting Ingeus’ ambitious goals would require adopting a new operating model. Specifically, McPherson was convinced that Ingeus need to adopt a more cloud-like, pay-for-consumption model that would reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), improve cash flow, enhance agility, and reduce administration and training effort.
The Solution & Results
Zadara and MTI teams worked closely with Ingeus to comprehensively assess financial, performance, and functional requirements. Zadara Solutions Architects analyzed legacy storage performance against key workloads and the resulting performance characterization data were then integrated with Ingeus’ financial goals.
Designing with real-world performance requirements ensured that the Zadara solution presented by MTI delivered the flexibility and economic benefits Ingeus needed without compromising on application responsiveness.
Zadara’s ability to scale-up, scale-down and non-disruptively migrate volumes meant that Ingeus no longer had to engage in complex long-term capacity planning exercises.
Ingeus avoided significant up-front capital investment in storage infrastructure and moved to a pay-for-consumption approach which also eliminated the need to over-buy capacity.
Zadara and MTI have enabled Ingeus to scale costs, incrementally and predictably to address changing demands. This, in turn, improved cash flow and enabled Ingeus to redeploy resources to strategic transformation projects.
The existing solution was reaching capacity and didn’t allow the flexibility for the business to scale up and down in line with contract timescales.
David McPherson
Global Head of Infrastructure, Ingeus Europe Limited
Initial Success Spans Expansion
Ingeus have been particularly pleased with Zadara’s support, ease-of-use, and fully-managed storage service. The speed and simplicity of data migration allowed Ingeus to retire legacy platforms and move to a fully managed Zadara platform, with a simultaneous performance improvement. Ingeus have now deployed Zadara in both of their UK data centres, leveraging hybrid flash and hard disk storage to achieve business-defined performance goals for core platforms, including large SQL databases, Citrix profiles and file workloads.
McPherson also reports that Zadara’s charge-back reporting has allowed the business units to be charged more transparently on the actual consumption costs of the technology stack. With the success of the first phase, Ingeus now plans to proceed with adoption of Zadara as the primary storage for additional business-critical applications.