A complete storage infrastructure replacement focused on cost reduction, minimising downtime and improving manageability.
Project Summary
A complete storage infrastructure replacement focused on cost reduction, minimising downtime and improving manageability.
Setting the Scene
The West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service is the county-wide, statutory emergency fire and rescue service for the metropolitan county of West Yorkshire, England. It is administered by the Fire and Rescue Authority, a group of 22 councillors who are appointed annually from the five metropolitan districts of West Yorkshire.
The Challenge
The service had ageing legacy storage infrastructure which was proving time consuming and difficult to manage including manually upgrading firmware for both shelves and disks. These updates needed scheduled downtime.
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West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue needed a solution which would:
Ease Management
Eliminate Downtime
Reduce
Costs
Take Back Control
The Solution
West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service went to market to test and investigate other technologies before deciding on Nimble Storage. Initially, there was no established relationship between NG-IT and the fire service, however we were able to utilise our level of expertise as the largest Nimble reseller in Europe.
The Benefits
The immediate benefit was the ease of transfer from their old storage to the new and complete data migration with zero downtime. The Nimble solution included iSCSI storage with built in replication and snapshotting which could be used as a means of back up and replication to a DR site. The ease of carrying out updates made management far less time consuming. The fire service no longer needed to rely upon a dedicated person to monitor storage thanks to the proactive monitoring capabilities (Infosight) from Nimble which represented another cost saving.
Martin Brown
ICT Infrastructure Manager
"Working with NG-IT, we found them both flexible and accommodating. A refreshing change.”
