Case Study
Objective
Replace legacy IT infrastructure, simplify
management, improve disaster recovery,
BC, and backup capabilities, and reduce
TCO.
Central One Federal Credit
Union streamlines disaster
recovery with HPE SimpliVity
Data-center-in-a-box hyperconverged solution
minimizes impact on operations
Approach
Adopt HPE SimpliVity to run all
applications, eliminate clutter and
establish a simplified “data-center-in-abox” solution with advanced, automated
DR capabilities.
IT Matters
• Seamless “data-center-in-a-box”
implementation
• Automated disaster recovery
• Enhanced flexibility
• Simplified management
Introduction
The IT team of a New England-based Credit
Union had been managing slow, steady
growth in their environment for several
years. Until recently, they maintained a
non-virtualized environment, with over 30
physical servers, each dedicated to a specific
application workload. Driven by the need to
improve their DR capabilities and the concern
that they would soon outgrow the physical
capacity of their two data centers, the IT
team decided to pursue a “P-to-V” migration
project, implementing VMware and deploying
virtual machines for each of the existing
physical servers.
In planning this project, the team recognized
the need for an infrastructure update that
aligned with the flexibility and scalability that
VMware enables. After a detailed analysis,
the team chose to adopt Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE) SimpliVity, HPE SimpliVity’s
federated and hyperconverged infrastructure
platform that delivers high-end data
protection and management functionality,
while enabling dramatic cost savings
compared to traditional infrastructure. In
selecting HPE SimpliVity, the Credit Union IT
team takes a big step forward in technology
adoption and believes that they can unlock
significant competitive advantages in making
this decision.
Business Challenge: Disaster
Recovery, Scalability, and
Technology Refresh
As with most IT infrastructures in mid-sized
enterprises, the Credit Union’s infrastructure
footprint had grown over the years and
began to stress the capacity of their two data
centers. Their non-virtualized environment
had become cumbersome to manage, so
the IT team began a market evaluation
for a replacement infrastructure. This led
the Credit Union’s IT staff to consider a
virtual architecture that would allow them
to consolidate physical resources and
Case study
Central One Federal
Credit Union
Industry
Banking
leverage new innovations to serve their
primary business applications. The IT
staff at the Credit Union was attracted to
virtualization’s ability to consolidate the
physical servers and meet their scalability
needs in the future. Additionally, they viewed
virtualization as a means to flexibly deploy
VMs, improve manageability, and create a
method for facilitating development and test
environments.
Once the decision to move to a VMware
environment was made, the executive
responsible for IT assembled his team to
develop a set of requirements for the physical
infrastructure that they would deploy to
support the new VMware-based environment.
The team set out four key requirements:
•Refresh the data center hardware with a
solution that aligns to the flexibility and
scalability of virtualization
•Provide for integrated disaster recovery to
resolve the current issues with long recovery
times
•Management simplicity, allowing the small
team to be proficient with a smaller set of
products
convergence. Providing a smaller footprint,
lower cost, and an enhanced integrated
feature set, HPE SimpliVity began to stand
out from the crowd. HPE SimpliVity’s
stackable HPE SimpliVity solution provided
a clean solution for their scalability needs
as well as a smooth integration point for
making the transition from physical to virtual
servers. The Credit Union’s many physical
servers would need to be converted to virtual
machines. They quickly identified that an HPE
SimpliVity solution, with its “data-center-in-abox” methodology, would provide an optimal
landing place for those new virtual machines.
Ultimately, it was disaster recovery that
moved HPE SimpliVity to the front of the
pack. The Credit Union had two data centers,
but had not been providing DR for their
applications due to bandwidth constraints
and the cost prohibitive nature of their
existing solutions. The native data protection
methods provided by HPE SimpliVity ,
coupled with the data virtualization platform
(DVP) that provides high-performance
real-time deduplication, compression, and
optimization for virtual machines, provided
the Credit Union with the DR capabilities they
needed to meet their business goals at no
additional cost.
•Shrink their infrastructure footprint
Upon setting out the requirements, the Credit
Union turned to their traditional vendors,
Dell and EMC, to evaluate options including
Equallogic and Data Domain. After reviewing
the traditional options, and realizing that
traditional infrastructure would not meet their
defined criteria, they expanded their research
to include next generation infrastructure
providers.
HPE SimpliVity Solution
In their review of next generation
solutions, the Credit Union discovered
that HPE SimpliVity’s globally federated,
hyperconverged IT infrastructure platform
fit their requirements in a unique way.
Space efficiency, singular management, and
ease of use were the natural attractors for
Upon selecting the HPE SimpliVity solution,
the Credit Union convened an extensive
evaluation. The team completed a “paper
bake-off’ of HPE SimpliVity against traditional
architectures and next generation solutions,
developed a rigorous financial analysis, and
thoroughly tested the units. The Credit
Union’s Board of Directors and CEO were
deeply involved with the analysis to ensure
that customer data was always protected.
Through hands-on evaluation, connecting
with reference customers, and experiencing
HPE SimpliVity’s Customer Support, the
Credit Union was able to overcome any
lingering doubt. The Credit Union recognized
that with the new DR capabilities enabled
by HPE SimpliVity , they would be in a
better business position than they would be
by continuing to rely on traditional server/
storage designs.
Case study
Central One Federal
Credit Union
Industry
Banking
Customer at a glance
Benefits
Hyperconverged Solutions
• HPE SimpliVity
HPE SimpliVity’s Credit Union customer has
proven the value and benefits of operating
an HPE SimpliVity federation in their IT
environment. Now operating two HPE
SimpliVity systems in the primary IT location,
and a stand-alone system in the second site,
the team is supporting several dozen virtual
machines and continues to migrate to the
new architecture, but the migration of some
applications onto HPE SimpliVity continues.
Key benefits that the Credit Union achieved
early in their use of HPE SimpliVity include:
•Seamless “data-center-in-a-box”
implementation.
The Credit Union was able to leverage
VMware’s “P-to-V” tools to schedule the
physical to virtual conversion onto HPE
SimpliVity while maintaining their existing
environment and minimizing the impact to
the business.
•Automated Disaster Recovery.
The Credit Union quickly began replicating
VMs from the primary site to the DR site,
and is now able to provide all VMs with the
same level of protection previously available
to only their main business application,
allowing the IT staff to sleep easy with all
VMs protected and online at the remote site.
•Enhanced Flexibility.
The Credit Union has already had
opportunities to leverage the flexibility of
an HPE SimpliVity-powered data center.
They were able to quickly modify the
configuration of the virtual machines
running their main business application to
accommodate more memory, improving the
applications’ overall performance.
•Simplified Management.
HPE SimpliVity has provided the Credit
Union with a simple solution that the
team has been able to adopt quickly and
seamlessly without sacrificing performance
or scalability.
The project has been an amazing success for
the Credit Union. The team is evaluating HPE
SimpliVity for virtual desktops in the future
and constructing use cases around mergers
and acquisitions. They feel HPE SimpliVity
will be a significant enabler for multi-site
solutions that need to provide seamless data
migrations.
Learn more at
hpe.com/info/simplivity
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© 2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
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liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
a00008290ENW, May 2017