When earthquakes rocked Christchurch, New Zealand a few years back, we faced our biggest challenge ever. Our data centers hosting critical applications for customers weathered the impact fairly well. It was a different story for many of our customers. Their facilities were severely damaged or destroyed. Customers and companies we hadn’t done business with before came to us for help. We worked day and night to help them restore their operations and data until they got back on their feet.
At CCL, we were in a fortunate position to help other companies during a disaster because we take availability very seriously. As the rock solid core of our infrastructure, EMC VMAX3 storage is essential to delivering on our imperative of availability. Deployed across four data centers, EMC VMAX3 supports everything from customers’ transactional databases to email to ERP to archival storage. Because we’re multi-tenant, a single EMC array supports multiple customers, not just one—pushing demand for availability even higher. The VMAX3 takes on huge workloads day after day and without a hiccup.
At the same time, we’re always striving to meet our customers’ performance and availability requirements in the most efficient way possible. VMAX3 delivers within those parameters as well. We spend less time on VMAX3 setup, configuration, and management compared with previous generations so we get a lot more done in less time
For example, our customer base and workload sizes have grown substantially and yet we haven’t needed to scale up our operations team or resources. The VMAX3 also lets us scale to far greater capacities than we ever could before. With VMAX3 delivering storage to our VMware environment, we gain even more agility to grow our environment quickly and efficiently.
The SLO provisioning features of VMAX3 are another example of our efficiency. Provisioning to a service level object rather than specific IO requirements works really well for us in a service provider multi-tenant environment. Because performance counters are geared to the SLOs, it’s easier to make sure our customers are getting the performance and service levels defined in their contracts with us.
We’re also spending less time on manually balancing customer workloads across the different storage tiers. We generally let VMAX3 make those choices for us and save on that time and effort.
The combination of VMAX3 running so reliably and the reduced time we spend on managing our storage has given us more opportunity to focus on innovative projects that tie directly to the satisfaction of our customers. It’s also great to know that just in case something unexpected happens—big or small, the VMAX3 will be there to help us weather the storm.