Ongo has deployed a Fujitsu all-flash storage solution from Central Networks and Technologies to support 70 applications, 450 users and 15,000 tenants, leading to a 20-fold increase in performance.
Ongo Homes was previously using a combination of three storage platforms to support its business operations and Citrix desktops. However, the lack of capacity across these solutions had led to a pronounced decrease in application performance.
Ryan Heseltine, solutions architect, Ongo, said, “The storage dropped off a cliff in terms of performance, with significant latency issues on our virtual machines. At the same time, the lack of capacity meant that we had to be very conservative with provisioning. Clearing out old files and troubleshooting the issues caused by high disk latencies was taking up a lot of our time and causing performance issues.”
Working with CNT, Ongo deployed a Fujitsu all-flash Eternus storage solution with 10Gb iSCSI for network convergence. Over the course of just one week, 70 virtual machines were migrated, covering Ongo’s entire infrastructure including core business functions such as document management, mobile applications and a tenant self-service portal.
Heseltine said, “The migration process was relatively straightforward because we have a virtual environment. We began with a couple of test VMs to prove stability and then rolled it out company-wide. In total, it took one week to transition to the new storage platform with no downtime along the way.
“Our entire infrastructure relies on this storage capacity, so to have such a seamless transition without disrupting our users or tenants was a great result. As a result of this success, we are now looking at adding our Citrix VDI infrastructure of 60 virtual machines to the Fujitsu storage platform.”
Ongo reported that its IT infrastructure was now at least 20 times faster than before, citing as an example the read latency on its virtual machines decreasing from 200ms to less than 1ms so reports that once took over five minutes to produce are now available almost immediately.
Heseltine said, “The performance has markedly improved with instant responsivity, which makes our users more effective. Furthermore, back-ups are far quicker and less prone to failure. That makes my team’s life easier.
“It is essentially a zero-touch management platform, which has made us realise just how much time we had been spending on administration. We are saving 40 man-hours per week through not having to firefight incidents.
“It is a storage solution that simply works – I haven’t needed to log into the management console once except for a training handover.”
