Customer Feedback

Saunderson House

Saunderson House is a leading firm of independent wealth managers based in the City of London providing award-winning advice to busy professionals and other high net worth individuals. They have a single-minded focus on helping clients grow, preserve and pass on their wealth. This is coupled with the highest standards of client care and a commitment to shoulder the administrative burden. They have won multiple awards including ‘Best Advisory Firm’ at the 2012 and 2013 Investment Week Fund Manager of the Year awards and ‘Adviser Firm of the Year’ at the 2014 Money Marketing awards.

Saunderson House continues to go from strength to strength as client acquisition grows and the firm expands. This growth strategy is supported by investment in a robust and reliable IT infrastructure. Trustco have developed a strong partnership with Saunderson House since first working together in 2011, and so when Saunderson House were looking to update their IT infrastructure, Trustco were the first number they dialled.

Saunderson House prides itself on innovation and has an open approach to researching and implementing cutting edge technology. In 2012 the company commissioned a project to virtualise desktops for its 125 employees to improve user experience and help reduce support issues.

Having kept his eye on emerging solutions within the marketplace, Dave Pritt, IT Business Services Manager for Saunderson House approached Trustco to find a suitable storage system to support the high performance required to support a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution.

Pritt commented, “I love researching different technologies and discussing products with manufacturers but I don’t always have time to do this justice. I knew Trustco understood the marketplace and would provide us with objective technical advice and guidance.”

Trustco constantly monitor the industry for new products from both established and new vendors to provide their customers with the most appropriate solution. The pre-sales team worked with Pritt to clearly define his requirement from the outset. Once the project drivers were established, Trustco suggested multiple vendor options and undertook an appraisal process with Pritt. After the individual technologies were discussed it was agreed that Nimble Storage, a recent new vendor to UK, was an attractive solution to investigate further.

Trustco were able to bring Nimble Storage and Saunderson House together to help demonstrate Nimble’s storage and management technologies. Trustco’s technical specialists then arranged a proof of concept; sanity checked the design and ensured that the support arrangements were in place with UK based engineers. Finally Trustco provided references so Saunderson House could have full confidence in the solution being presented.

Based on this appraisal Saunderson House opted for two Nimble Storage CS210 arrays. With the solution agreed, using its ‘authorised reseller’ status with Nimble Storage, Trustco were able to negotiate a competitive price for Saunderson House. By using the experienced project management team from Trustco, the installation was completed in just over two hours, on time and within budget.

Parallel to this project Saunderson House’s existing storage management tools provided raw performance and usage data only; creating reports involved manual and time-consuming processes and analysing performance over time was not easy.

A major feature of all Nimble Storage systems is InfoSight. This gives Pritt an insight into the health of all Nimble Storage arrays, and enables his team to accurately capacity plan and forecast through intuitive, comprehensive dashboards.

In addition to this, its proactive monitoring sends regular ‘heart beats’ to Nimble Storage’s automated monitoring system. This allows engineers to pick up possible issues quickly, and lets them to diagnose and rectify issues before Saunderson House’s IT team arrive in the office in the morning. Pritt comments, “It is reassuring to know that our storage infrastructure is being monitored whilst I am asleep, and all this comes as standard with every system I buy.”

Due to the sensitive nature of the highly regulated financial industry, compliance is of great importance and so a secure backup disaster recovery solution is fundamental. To ensure that critical systems are replicated, tested and available when required, Trustco worked with Pritt to integrate Nimble Storage with PHD Virtual’sReliableDR now Unitrends.

ReliableDR provides Pritt with a daily report showing that each system has been tested in the disaster recovery site so any issues can be dealt with immediately, and not only identified when a fail-over has occurred.

Pritt commented, “Compliance with stringent legislation is not just a legal obligation, it also preserves the reputation of the firm. Providing access to secure applications at all times allows our Financial Advisors to provide the highest levels of service to our clients and the integrated solution implemented and supported by Trustco allows this.”

Saunderson House had previously hosted their IT infrastructure at two secure data centres; one located at their headquarters in London and second at a colocation facility in Docklands. When the decision was made to migrate more of their IT infrastructure to a 2nd colocation facility outside the M25, the move prompted a further review of their storage needs.

Separate to the VDI project, to get the required performance and efficiency out of their existing non-Nimble Storage solution, Saunderson House would have had to add costly expansion trays on both site’s systems with an additional sixty drives. Rack space within colocation facilities can prove costly so there was a need to maintain the same footprint whilst ensuring the new solution would be as secure and flexible as possible.

Based on the success of the VDI project, Nimble Storage was a major contender for the storage refresh, but Trustco were asked to look at alternatives to ensure Saunderson House obtained the correct solution for their expanding business.

After further appraisal, Pritt nominated Trustco to deliver two CS260 replicated Nimble Storage systems as its scalable nature allows Saunderson House the ability to upgrade in small steps and expand as required. Also due to performance improvement against the existing solution; Saunderson House were able to avoid renting additional rack space. The Nimble Storage arrays also consume a quarter of the energy compared to the previous units whilst delivering a better performance – 3-5 milliseconds latency compared with 50-100 milliseconds.

Trustco’s focused pre-sales and project management team partnered with Saunderson House to deliver:

A scalable, efficient and resilient storage solution which delivers increase performance and improved latency without increasing colocation footprint
An intuitive management and monitoring solution to help with IT planning whilst reducing downtime
A disaster recovery solution to ensure critical systems and data is available when required

Trustco is increasingly becoming the partner of choice for delivering industry-leading IT technology solutions. When asked how Trustco performed against his expectations, Pritt replied, “Our partnership means we have been able to take advantage of their strong track record in delivering intelligent IT solutions. Their sound pre-sales technical advice, first class account management, installation and post-sales support are big factors in why we continue to choose them.”

Michelle Cope, Sales Manager for Trustco commented, “There is an established understanding between Trustco and Saunderson House as both organisations look to embrace new technologies to improve IT performance. We look forward to developing our relationship with Saunderson House further by exploring other innovative solutions in the future.”

“I love researching different technologies but I don’t always have time to do this justice. I knew Trustco understood the marketplace and would provide us with objective technical advice and guidance.”
Dave Pritt, IT Business Services Manager, Saunderson House

Joules

When UK-based premium lifestyle brand Joules needed to address potential storage performance problems in its SQL Server Data Warehouse, they contacted Trustco to discuss new innovative products in the storage market.

SQL Server Data Warehouse was struggling with legacy storage capacity and performance
End of life storage and costly support contracts needed replacing
Future proofing

Following a number of years of strong business growth and an IPO, the twice daily re-build of its Data Warehouse models, used to deliver business decision makers fresh business data in the morning and afternoon, was starting to experience latency issues.

Joules is a large and well established business, with 97 stores in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. It has a customer database of two million people spanning the globe, who access its products through an established e-commerce platform. To help make strategic decisions, management uses data analytics to build a picture of customer interest and spending and reacts accordingly. In short, data is becoming increasingly essential to the ongoing development of the business.

“The SQL Server Data Warehouse takes a feed from all systems across the business and then the data is used to predict spending, stock levels and so on,” comments Mike Stevens, IT Service Delivery and Technical Manager at Joules. “So it’s very valuable and performance is of course, key.”

Having partnered on key IT infrastructure projects since 2013, Joules once again selected Trustco to help outline their requirements and to give an unbiased view of the storage market. “Trustco helps us work through our ‘pinch points’. Our IT team trust their recommendations and this gives us the confidence to purchase the correct solutions” says Stevens.

After careful consideration of the options available Joules selected HPE Nimble’s predictive all Flash array, delivering 60,000 IOPS and offering 3.5TB capacity. The speed and power of the all Flash storage system would easily meet the performance demands of the SQL Server Data Warehouse with room to spare.

“In fact it surprised us because not only did it fulfil its performance promise it also cut re-build times by 50 per cent,” says Stevens. “That of course means we can start to offer the business double the number of re-builds in a day making the data even more up-to-date for critical decision making.”

Joules deployed a HPE Nimble AF3000 All Flash Array on the recommendation of Trustco. The immediate performance upturn has rippled across the business and is the latest, successful implementation of HPE Nimble hardware and Trustco support.

“We had limited time on this project but we fully trust Trustco’s recommendations so we went from proposal to sign off in under two weeks” Stevens adds.

Joules’ first encounter with HPE Nimble was back in 2013, a point at which it wanted to increase virtualisation of the IT environment. Trustco was called in to pitch solutions to replace Joules’ legacy NetApp arrays which, according to Stevens, were old and needed re-licencing. This meant they were going to be costly to maintain.

Two NetApp FAS 2040s with expansion shelves offering a total capacity of 20TB were replaced with two HPE Nimble CS220s (with an expansion tray (EC1-H25)) giving Joules a usable capacity of 21TB and the ability to effectively manage its Hyper V-based infrastructure. It was the start of a mutually beneficial relationship and one that has continued to impress Stevens, from hardware performance and scalability through to predictive analytics and support.

“Honestly it is one of the very best support experiences I’ve ever had, it’s very proactive,” says Stevens.

A large part of this proactivity is managed through HPE Nimble’s InfoSight technology, which enables Joules to be automatically alerted to potential issues but also to plan ahead, enabling Joules to have a holistic view of the storage network at any given moment in time.

“InfoSight is excellent as it can accurately give us a picture of what to expect both in terms of performance but also capacity,” adds Stevens. “This means we can keep a close eye on things but also intelligently plan for the future, which is important given that the company never really throws any data away.”

Joules has its own in-house design and photography capability for its mail order business. As a result, Stevens says the data creation “is vast” so an easily scalable storage solution is essential.

“We received the AF3000 at our Corby distribution centre at 9.30 in the morning and it was up and running, fully installed within two and a half hours. For a SAN, that’s amazing,” says Stevens. “I have never had anything go in at this size and cost so quickly. It’s a career first.”

“Trustco helps us work through our ‘pinch points’. Our IT team trust their recommendations and this gives us the confidence to purchase the correct solutions”.
Mike Stevens, IT Service Delivery and Technical Manager, Joules

UDG Healthcare

UDG Healthcare, a joint venture company between United Drug and Alliance Boots, is the UK market leader in healthcare pre-wholesaling. Their 700 employees supply over £3 Billion per annum of pharmaceutical, veterinary and consumer health products.

Four MHRA approved warehouse campuses store thousands of different products in temperatures ranging from ambient to frozen levels. The national distribution fleet is GPS tracked to ensure a quality controlled one stop shop for all clients.

The IT function is critical to supporting UDG’s strategy of “Service Excellence as Standard”. IT Director Scott Wilson-Benner has been with the company for 19 years, developing cross-functional expertise in a fast moving multi-user environment and an evolving marketplace.

Scott explains, “Our clients range from international blue chip pharmaceutical companies requiring 10,000 pallets, to small high growth enterprises storing 10 pallets. They all demand consistent high quality on-time delivery and support services in a highly competitive market. Our IT technology and support strategy is to proactively select the best suppliers of equipment and services to meet our own demanding supply chain needs.”

The number of UDG sites is growing, client numbers are expanding and data storage capacity and accessibility need to keep pace.

UDG’s growth, coupled with increased needs for disaster recovery resilience and expectations of zero downtime from clients demanded a review of IT infrastructure systems and services.

Scott says, “We looked extensively at all supply options from our existing international public listed company providers to some of the new breed specialists who have built reputations as niche experts without high cost corporate brand marketing."

“Our high spec IT supplier requirements included demonstrations that they could provide proven backup systems, guaranteed storage, nationwide support and the ability to grow with fully protected, scalable, stable platforms expanding over the next three years. Smooth change with simple robust backup and no disruption was essential.”

The new VMware solution has been installed, tested, piloted and rolled out to mirror site servers and storage. If a site suffers total destruction the backup is immediate, automatic and with no interference to operations. A real test occurred when an extended power outage cut power to the computer room in the main site.

Scott explains, “Like insurance, our extra resilience was an absolute godsend and a golden solution. We have reduced the costs of our legacy licences. We reduced 30 support calls per month to zero with great cost savings. System performance headaches are a thing of the past. Our operations have greater performance scalability. All business critical systems are now fully compliant and resilient. And very important – no one noticed the new system – that’s real proof of success.”

UDG has the necessary resilience, reliability and extra storage to develop new business as their client base grows exponentially. Their principle strategy “Service Excellence as Standard” is in safe hands to meet future challenges.

The final words come from Tim Cripps, Sales Director for Trustco, “We are delighted to be first choice providers in preference to an international billion dollar brand. We believe our transparency in assessing options, risks and returns builds trust with our business partners and we can prove our claims are real.”

“All business critical systems are now fully compliant and resilient.“
Scott Wilson-Benner, IT Director, UDG Healthcare plc

Cygnia

Cygnia is one of the UK’s leading providers of e-commerce and multi-channel fulfilment services. With 420 employees across the UK, Cygnia supports its customers’ growth by providing tailored, quality-driven and cost-effective services that include order fulfilment, customer packaging, order tracking and worldwide returns management. Cygnia is respected for providing the scale of the largest 3PL businesses with a personal touch.

Cygnia was reaching the limit of the capacity on its legacy HP StorageWorks P2000 unit that stored the organisation’s virtualised servers, the majority of which ran business-critical applications such as warehouse management systems, file servers, and online transactional processing. “We could have bought another shelf for our existing solution; however, we were keen to invest in a new array of the highest quality that would future-proof ourselves for the next few years,” explained Grant Surridge, IT Controller at Cygnia.

While capacity was the main driver for the investment in a fresh storage array, other key considerations in the selection process were high reliability and data availability due to the business-critical nature of the organisation’s data, as well as cost and performance.

Initial outreach to its previous IT provider did not result in a suitable solution for Cygnia’s storage requirements, so Grant contacted Trustco to gain an independent view of the data storage market. Trustco’s pre-sales team worked with Grant to clearly understand the organisation’s infrastructure and workflows and after undertaking an appraisal process with Grant, Trustco suggested that Cygnia opt for a Western Digital IntellFlash hybrid array.

Trustco bought Western Digital and Cygnia together to arrange a proof of concept; sanity check the design and ensured the solution fully met the project scope.

After comparing the price and technology of a few competing solutions, Cygnia concluded that the IntelliFlash unit stood out both in terms of economics and technical specifications. “In particular, we were impressed by the advanced deduplication and compression techniques. Capacity was the key driver for our investment in a new storage solution. IntelliFlash shrinks the volume of data that actually needs to be stored without impacting the performance,” said Grant.

The IntelliFlash OS is a fast, flexible operating environment designed to leverage different grades of storage media in a single storage array. It understands the inherent characteristics of different storage media and intelligently manages the placement of data to deliver optimal performance with the best possible economics. It also includes advanced data services such as inline compression and deduplication, multi-protocol support, and flexible management capabilities, enabling customers to significantly shrink their storage footprints, maximize uptime, consolidate workloads, and simplify storage administration.

Fully meeting Cygnia’s reliability and data availability requirements, IntelliFlash hybrid arrays are fully redundant with no single point of failure. All media (flash and hard disk storage) are dual-ported and accessible through a pair of active/active controllers. As an extra layer of safety, users can take instantaneous, space-efficient snapshots that can be replicated for disaster recovery.

Through deduplication and compression, the total volume of data to be stored has reduced by 62.6%, which provides vast leeway for the company’s growth and expansion over the upcoming years. Since the implementation, Cygnia has added another ten servers that are stored on the IntelliFlash unit, and the organisation is continually creating more data. The hybrid system is more than capable of coping with this expansion both with regards to performance and capacity.

“We now have a solid storage system at the heart of our operation. With so many business-critical applications vital to the company and our customers running on the array, it was of the upmost importance that we found a unit that ensured our data was protected and readily available and that also offered high performance and good economics,” explains Grant. “The IntelliFlash array answers all our requirements, and with the data reduction techniques, we do not need to worry about our data storage for the next few years.”

Having established a strong relationship and deep understanding of the organisation’s IT requirements, Trustco is now also a trusted advisor to Cygnia when it comes to all aspects of its IT infrastructure.

Following the success of this storage project Trustco also provided technical consultancy and installation services to deliver a combined backup solution using Veeam and VMware to support VMs and VDI users.

Trustco also continues to provide responsive and personalised 24/7 support for Cygnia across its backup, storage and virtualisation infrastructure.

“We are impressed with Trustco’s knowledge IT infrastructure market and have full confidence to trust in their advice and recommendations. We are happy that we receive cost-effective, high performing solutions which address our business needs every time.”
Grant Surridge, IT Controller, Cygnia

Racing Post

Racing Post started life as a daily horse racing, greyhound racing and sports betting newspaper in 1986. Moving with the times it has developed successful iPad and digital editions and its website received over 40,000 concurrent connections during the 2014 Grand National.

With over 300 internal desktop users operating over three sites in central London, Berkshire and Ireland the organisation is heavily reliant on IT systems for day to day tasks.

Johan Pieterse, Head of Operations and Security for Racing Post heads up an IT team of 15 people who are responsible for providing 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support across the business.

As the business becomes more flexible the need has arisen for employees to be able to hot desk across offices and work remotely. This presented issues as the company would need to start reducing the number of desktops across the business as well as security concerns over remote working.

To help achieve this, Racing Post started exploring VDI solutions which would provide seamless remote access to business critical applications.

Johan undertook some desk research and came across a ThinPoint, a VDI solution from NetLeverage. ThinPoint is secure, high performance and cost effective platform, which centralises, virtualises and delivers desktop and applications over TCP/IP network and the internet.

Intrigued, Johan contacted Trustco – NetLeverage’s exclusive UK distributor – to find out more. Trustco’s dedicated Account Manager organised a WebEx to demonstrate the solution and then arranged for a live trial for Racing Post to pilot throughout their business.

Impressed with what he saw, Johan challenged his existing IT suppliers to come up with similar VDI solutions which would match the flexible approach with the cost benefits that ThinPoint offers. Having researched further VDI solutions including industry leading options from VMware and Citrix, Johan opted to install ThinPoint.

Johan was keen to point out that ThinPoint is simple to install, utilising existing client-side resources for reduced server workload. It has simplified management as his IT team can centrally install, secure and upgrade all user applications and desktops from a single Windows desktop OS image.

It is a cost-effective solution as concurrent licensing means Racing Post only pays for what they use rather than individual licenses for each user. It has also had a positive knock-on effect on hardware costs and support calls, which have helped influence IT strategy throughout the business.

Johan commented; “Now if a laptop breaks I switch users over to an HP Thin Client and run ThinPoint straight from this. Not only has this reduced hardware costs as a Thin Client is considerably cheaper to purchase than a laptop, associated support calls have dropped dramatically as well. The only reason people call us now is if they have forgotten their password, instead of all the day-to-day issues that come with supporting a laptop. The members of my team who run 1st Line Support are very happy!”

After piloting this solution Racing Post is looking to implement this further across the business throughout 2015.

“I love the solution” enthused Johan. “Show me another VDI solution which is this flexible and scalable without additional hardware and software costs.

We are delighted with ThinPoint, and the support we’ve had from Trustco throughout the testing, installation and ongoing support has been superb.”

Trustco has been NetLeverage’s exclusive UK distributor since 2012. To find out more information on the ThinPoint solution visit netleverage.co.uk.

“We are delighted with the ThinPoint solution, and the support we’ve had from Trustco throughout the testing, installation and ongoing support has been superb.”
Johan Pieterse, Head of Operations and Security Racing Post

The National Trust for Scotland

Established in 1931, the National Trust for Scotland is a conservation charity that protects and promotes Scotland’s natural and cultural heritage for present and future generations to enjoy.

The Trust owns and manages around 130 properties and 180,000 acres of land, including castles, ancient small dwellings, historic sites, gardens, and remote rural areas. Its current membership stands at around 310,000 members.

Scott Newton, Head of IT for the National Trust for Scotland heads up an IT team of 10 across the estate. The Trust’s IT infrastructure is called upon to support over 500 full-time and 700 seasonal staff and approximately 4,000 volunteers.

When Scott joined the company in early 2013 he inherited an aging IT infrastructure which was in urgent need of modernisation. This was causing his department considerable technical problems and was proving difficult to support. Rather than fix individual issues, Scott opted to roll out a full IT upgrade and part of this programme was to address and centralise the Trust’s data storage infrastructure.

After thoroughly researching the data storage market, Scott came across Trustco.

Trustco helped clearly define the Trust’s requirement from the outset. This included talking through the Trust’s 5 year IT plan to ensure that any solution provided would be easily scalable to support future upgrades.

Being a charity, it was also agreed that the solution would have to be as cost effective as possible and a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) plan would need to be established from the outset.

Technically, the solution would need to support a new VMware vSphere virtualised platform hosting I/O intensive applications including multiple Microsoft SQL databases and specialist IT systems for charity management.

Finally the new storage platform would have to be simple to manage to allow the IT team to proactively monitor and manage the performance of the SAN moving forward.

Trustco constantly monitor the industry for new products from both established and new vendors.

Taking into account the performance required and budget available, Trustco suggested that the Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 solution would be a great fit for the Trust as it would provide the perfect balance between speed, capacity and cost to meet Scott’s needs.

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 delivers real-time tiering, thin provisioning, and rapid RAID rebuild, with an intuitive web user interface. It automatically manages ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ data in real-time and responds minute by minute, moving the most heavily accessed data up to the SSD tier, while detecting less active data and moving it to a lower, less expensive, HDD tier.

From a financial perspective, there are no hidden future costs or ongoing licence fees when looking to add new features or expand storage capacity.

Finally, RealStor, Dot Hill’s built in management software, has a simple, intuitive GUI which would allow Scott’s IT team to remove guesswork by simplifying the monitoring and management process.

Intrigued by automated data tiering, Scott invited Dot Hill along with three other leading storage manufacturers to attend a demonstration day so each solution could be technically and financially appraised.

During the appraisal, Scott found that Dot Hill was the only solution to offer fully automated data tiering and real-time data migration, all the other systems performed data migration as a batch process. This was a major attraction for Scott.

Following on from the demonstration day Scott worked with Trustco on the technical design, product configuration and established a firm TCO for this solution.

Trustco took care of the procurement management with Dot Hill and managed to negotiate a competitive price for the National Trust for Scotland.

Pleased that the solution would meet and surpass his original objectives at an attractive price, Scott proceeded with the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 solution. Trustco’s project management team, combined with Dot Hill’s support and maintenance services ensured a smooth installation.

When asked how this solution performed against his expectations, Scott replied; “Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN solutions’ scalable nature allows us to upgrade in small steps and expand as required. The autonomic, real-time data tiering is very smart. By prioritising data in real-time the system has improved performance dramatically and our storage infrastructure is now reliable and resilient to meet future plans.”

Impressed with the outcome of this initial project, Scott has since nominated Trustco to deliver two additional Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3004 storage arrays to provide backup for increased resilience.

Scott commented; “I love Trustco’s transparent pricing, they provide a one-off upfront cost and as a charity, a clear TCO from the outset is very important."

“Our Account Manager at Trustco continues to be exceptional but the whole team really went the extra mile on this project to ensure we received a cost effective, high performing solution.”

------

N.B. Since this case study was published, Seagate Technology have acquired Dot Hill Systems.

“I love Trustco’s transparent pricing, they provide a one-off upfront cost and as a charity, a clear TCO from the outset is very important.“
Scott Newton, Head of IT, the National Trust for Scotland

TelecityGroup

Founded in 1998, TelecityGroup is a leading provider of carrier-neutral data centres in Europe, operating highly-connected facilities in prime city centre positions in Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Istanbul, London, Manchester, Milan, Paris, Sofia, Stockholm and Warsaw.

Customers choose Telecity because of its high-quality infrastructure and service standards, connectivity options and capacity to support their future growth.

Trustco have partnered with Telecity on a range of IT infrastructure projects since 2010. These projects range from advising and configuring servers and server upgrades to providing software, storage and networking solutions.

Driven by customer demands Telecity have been expanding hosting capacity by building new data centres and expanding existing facilities to ensure they have the infrastructure to support their clients’ growth. Part of this expansion has included an extensive Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution connecting established and new data centres across Europe.

To help support this project a new robust data storage platform was required to deliver improved performance to maintain an excellent Quality of Service (QoS) at all times regardless of data workload demands.

Having trialled a number of ‘all flash’ storage systems with limited success, Paul Bruff, Group Technical Architect for Telecity approached Trustco to provide an independent appraisal of the storage marketplace.

Trustco’s pre-sales team worked with Telecity to clearly define his requirement and once Telecity’s project drivers were established, Trustco discussed the merits of autonomic tiering.

Trustco constantly monitor the data storage industry for new innovative products from both established and new vendors. As an independent reseller they were able to talk Telecity through the benefits of hybrid solutions combining both SSD and traditional HDD technologies that would provide the performance and the capacity that they required. Telecity was also looking for a solution which would be simple to manage and was working to a strict budget so these factors were taken into consideration.

After careful consideration of the options available Telecity wanted to explore the Dot Hill AssuredSAN™ series with RealStor™ monitoring software.

The AssuredSAN RealTier tiering software automatically manages ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ data in real-time to deliver cost effective storage performance. With this tiered data storage solution, storage responds minute by minute to changes in data requirements, moving the most heavily accessed data up to the SSD tier, while detecting less active data and moving it to a lower tier. This data migration happens in real-time, without policy setting and human intervention.

This advantage of data storage tiering is that it offers an effective balance of high performance (with the very fast SSDs) and low cost (with the relatively inexpensive HDDs) which makes this a cost effective solution. Faster I/O is achieved in part through real-time, automated data tiering, which prioritises data files, volumes or blocks between tiered storage using built-in analysis and data scoring.

Trustco were able to bring Dot Hill and Telecity together to help demonstrate the benefits of this solution followed by a stringent pricing comparison exercise.

To give Telecity full confidence in the solution being presented, Trustco provided relevant customer references. Trustco were able to introduce Telecity to another Managed Service Provider who had installed a Dot Hill AssuredSAN solution. This helped Telecity’s IT team understand how the solution worked in a similar environment and provided invaluable first-hand experience from industry peers.

Finally Trustco negotiated a ‘try’n’buy’ option with Dot Hill which allowed Telecity to commence a full on-site validation over a 4 week period.

After a successful trial, Telecity deployed the Dot Hill AssuredSAN solution with RealStor software to help underpin the European roll-out of the VDI network.

The initial Dot Hill installation supports a completely virtualised environment hosting over 200 virtual desktops driven by Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 VDI. The AssuredSAN arrays host several support and financial applications in addition to the VDI infrastructure all running on Cisco UCS C-Series blade servers in a clustered configuration for complete redundancy. The integrated RealStor management software has helped simplify storage management and helps Telecity plan for future expansion.

Delighted with the outcome of this project, Telecity have since gone on to partner with Trustco and install additional solutions from the Dot Hill AssuredSAN series.

Trustco partnered with Dot Hill to deliver a hybrid solution combining both SSD and traditional HDD technologies to provide real-time autonomic tiering to improve IT and I/O performance
Trustco’s extensive experience of the storage marketplace provided quick, detailed and accurate knowledge on the options available for Telecity to explore further
The ‘try’n’buy’ option gave full confidence in the solution being presented and was supported by strong customer references

“We are expanding our customer capacity in key European locations by building new data centres and expanding existing facilities. Leading edge data storage technology from Dot Hill, supported by Trustco, ensures we have the performance and capacity to support our clients’ growth.”
Paul Bishop, CIO, TelecityGroup

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_ga_4NR2DXZKY6	2 years	This cookie is installed by Google Analytics.

Cookie	Duration	Description
IDE	1 year 24 days	Google DoubleClick IDE cookies store information about how the user uses the website to present them with relevant ads according to the user profile.
li_sugr	3 months	LinkedIn sets this cookie to collect user behaviour data to optimise the website and make advertisements on the website more relevant.
test_cookie	15 minutes	doubleclick.net sets this cookie to determine if the user's browser supports cookies.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	5 months 27 days	A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface.
YSC	session	YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages.
yt-remote-connected-devices	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video.
yt-remote-device-id	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video.
yt.innertube::nextId	never	This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
yt.innertube::requests	never	This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.

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