Customer Background
Sentia worked with one of Canada's largest real estate investment trusts to refresh its secondary storage backup environment with a new IBM storage solution along with Disaster Recovery managed services. This organization has been in operation for over 20 years and has developed friendly, accessible, and vibrant neighbourhoods across Canada and Europe. With over $17 billion in assets, it is poised to become one of the largest real estate firms worldwide.
IT Environment and Challenges
The firm needed to extend its backup capacity and add an IBM SAN to the mix. It also wanted to guard against ransomware and set up the repository to be immutable. In particular, the organization wanted to refresh its IBM v5030e secondary storage backup environment due to multiple challenges which included:
- Ransomware and other business continuity pitfalls
- Gap in expertise in managing large data farms
- Identifying suitable storage solutions to refresh existing ones
- Limited visibility into its digital infrastructure and storage solutions
Selection Process
Faced with these challenges, the company began a thorough vetting process to identify a suitable Managed Services Provider (MSP) that could also help refresh its IBM storage backup solution and migrate their data. As a result, the company identifed Sentia as a suitable partner.
Solution
Sentia's team went into immediate action by setting up multiple meetings with the following objectives:
- Lead a planning session with the company's technical team to gain a deeper understanding of their IT environment
- Review and plan network requirements
- Review and plan storage requirements
- Discuss migration procedures and requirements
Sentia proposed the IBM FlashSystem 5035 as the most appropriate solution to refresh the company's storage solution. This upgrade would come with advanced features and capabilities, including:
- Greater functionality
- Powerful encryption to guard against ransomware attacks
- Data duplication
- Thin provisioning
- Data reduction pools
- Clustering capabilities for scale out and scale up
In addition, with Sentia monitoring the storage solution, their team of professionals gave the company valuable time back to focus on core business objectives and provided the necessary support. Sentia also recommended the solution since it increases efficiency through the data pools that transform data storage economics. In addition, the data reduction pools can be applied to existing storage to increase usable capacity without significantly affecting applications' consistent performance.
Additional features of the proposed solution include:
- Rock-solid data resilience
- Enhanced data mobility
- Immutable repository
- Turnkey solution
- SAN with enough storage for many years
- Greater storage control, visibility, and insight
- Innovative container and virtualization technologies
Once the Sentia team completed the implementation process successfully, it helped the company migrate corporate data from the existing storage to the IBM FS5035 securely using IBM FlashSystem storage migration features and a host-based migration method.