Ortigas & Company, a leader in the Philippines’ real estate sector, has deployed high-performance Nimble CS-Series arrays to boost the organization’s disaster recovery (DR), backup and replication processes.
For more than 80 years, Ortigas & Company has been a leader in the Philippines’ real estate sector, building master-planned developments that form the basis for thriving communities such as Capital Commons. Its portfolio represents some of the country’s best residential, business and commercial developments including the landmark Greenhills Shopping Centre, financial district Ortigas Center, value regional shopping destination, Tiendesitas and residential condominium community, Circulo Verde.
Capable of running critical applications at sub-millisecond latencies, the new Nimble arrays deliver high performance due to the efficiencies of the company’s Adaptive Flash platform, comprised of the its CASL file system and InfoSight cloud based management. The technology also offers deep integration with the two key elements of Ortigas’ IT environment – VMware and Microsoft.
Approximately 150 staff at Ortigas rely on daily access to applications that help them to store and manage designs, keep an eye on budgets, manage suppliers, communicate with customers and control projects.
Ortigas & Company has been a leader in the Philippines’ real estate sector, building master-planned developments that form the basis for thriving communities such as Capital Commons.
The organization’s incumbent, aging Storage Area Network (SAN) was unable to scale to meet user demand while performance had begun to suffer. Keeping data safe was another concern, as the traditional SAN made replication prohibitively expensive and difficult to conduct. In addition, backups and restoration were taking far too long, further impacting the business.
Following a review of potential solutions conducted by Erudyn, an Ortigas consulting partner, two Nimble CS-Series arrays were deployed at Ortigas’ primary site, with an additional array at the company’s DR site.
Reggie Acbang, network administrator at Ortigas, says, “We decided to adopt Nimble because of its simplicity. It is easy to use and it has excellent compression technology. It is also much cheaper than other storage solutions because you don’t have to buy additional licenses for different functionality. Replication and backup are already bundled in the machines, so they come for free.”
“Nimble’s replication capability is extremely efficient and sends only compressed changed data over IP. This makes it an ideal fit for companies within The Philippines where network bandwidth across the islands is expensive.”
Backups, which used to take eight hours, are now completed within five minutes. In the event of a disaster, Acbang says in the past it would have taken at least half a day to restore just one database to one server. Using Nimble’s replication, he estimates the company now only requires 20 minutes to get systems fully up and running again.
Nimble’s compression technologies and thin provisioning have led to a massive reduction in storage consumption, ensuring plenty of room for future growth.
Acbang says, “We’re still in the process of moving data off the SAN onto the Nimble but we hope to finish next month. It’s already clear we will have a lot more free space. Right now, we’re only using around 10 per cent of our capacity and it’s clear when we finish we will have a lot more free space.”
The ease of the Nimble user interface has made it possible for everyone within the IT team to access storage information, view performance and contribute to management of the solution.
Acbang says the Nimble arrays have more than lived up to their promise. “They were simple to deploy and are very simple to manage. Unlike other brands of storage, creating a volume is straightforward. Before, I often used to have to call our old vendor for support. Now, I no longer have to because everything is so easy.”
