Katana1 deploys all-flash Pure Storage solution to financial services provider Equity Trustees

Service integrator Katana1 has helped fund-management firm Equity Trustees rip and replace its storage network array in favour of an all-flash system.

Recognising that all-flash “was the future”, Equity Trustees approached frequent partner Katana1 to deploy a Pure Storage FlashArray//m20 solution.

Equity Trustees said their previous storage area network (SAN) solution had frequent outages, with internal resources being spent on managing storage.

“Implementing Pure Storage at Equity Trustees means that there is the ability to introduce new innovative technologies outside of infrastructure that are going to deliver value to the business, much easier moving forward," Katana1 Victorian sales director James Vercillo said.

Equity Trustees traces its origins as far back as 1888, and has grown organically throughout the decades and through acquisitions to become what it is today. The company has offices in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Bendigo and London.

It has been the custodian of more than 50,000 wills, most of which were only ever produced in hard copy format.

Digitising the wills and making them searchable also played into the decision to upgrade the company’s storage, with better performance expected to boost business productivity.

Another factor was Equity Trustees’ ongoing strategy for hybrid play for its core infrastructure, recognising the need for an on-premises solution that would be compatible to some of the company’s legacy applications.

“Pure Storage are industry leaders and are emerging with new technology such as flash SSDs,” Equity Trustees chief technology officer Phing Lee said.

“The Evergreen model is also something that resonated with us and was in line with our methodology of investing in and partnering with vendors that have a comprehensive offering, not just point solutions.”

The company also wanted to trim its data footprint, cut costs from power and data centre space and ease the strain on networks and backup windows.

“The Pure Storage solution is like connecting a massive USB into your network and it’s ready to go. Previously, when doing upgrades we’ve had to declare outages for entire weekends and to do full test cycles,” Equity Trustees IT manager Akash Mittal said.

“Our experience with Pure Storage was nothing compared to that. There was no need to advertise any outages. The full migration was seamless and disruption minimal.”

Moving forward, Equity Trustees said it is better positioned to potentially use artificial intelligence thanks to its new data-centric architecture.

“Equity Trustees is cognisant that the best AI solutions have the right combination of compute, memory and storage, and is looking ahead to develop existing architecture which can support the demands of an AI solution when it is ready to take that innovation pathway,” the company said.

Katana1 was founded in 2011 and saw rapid revenue growth in 2013 and 2016, earning it No.2 and No.7 in the CRN Fast50 lists for the respective years.