NGage Technology Group saves customer KordaMentha $400,000 with Pure Storage FlashStack

NGage Technology Group has deployed Pure Storage FlashStack for advisory firm KordaMentha, saving the company $400,000 over the next four years.

KordaMentha, who provides turnaround and restructuring, real estate and forensic support for companies, started using FlashStack, a next-generation data centre platform solution back in 2015. At the time, a simple purchase through Blue Connections was made until KordaMentha realised the full potential of the solution.

That was when No. 10 on the 2016 CRN Fast50 NGage came into play. In December 2016, the company decided to do some trials in its forensics and analytics environment, which at the time was a mixture of NetApp, HP, Cisco storage.

The trials on the original FlashStack showed a six-times faster result, allowing the company’s analytics processes to go from six hours down to one. So Korda decided to implement another FlashStack solution.

KordaMentha director of technology Ryan Wadsworth told CRN: “NGage was really good in regards to facilitating the relationship between Korda and Pure. NGage had the technical knowledge to be able to provide us with a solution and not just a product."

“We needed a solution that could handle all of our workloads from analytics reporting to remote desktop services without any latency.

“With FlashStack, we are always up and running and it was so simple that once we plugged it in, it was ready to operate within 15 minutes. On top of this, the Pure maintenance model is ground-breaking: the technology stays fresh, gets newer, faster, more dense, and costs us less over time,” Wadsworth added.

So far, KordaMentha has experienced zero management overhead with physical management of storage. Time spent on maintaining the backup infrastructure has decreased from three days to a few hours a week.

Enhancements announced with Cisco

Pure Storage has announced enhancements to FlashStack, which include new Cisco Validated Designs with SAP, VMware, Citrix and Commvault.

FlashStack combines compute, network, and storage hardware into an integrated architecture that speeds time to deployment, lowers overall IT costs, and reduces deployment risk. The solution, comprising of Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and Pure Storage, is a modular and scalable platform.

The Validated Design with SAP HANA TDI provides a flexible solution for customers running applications on SAP. FlashRecover snapshots and replication meet backup compliance and disaster recovery requirements for both SAP and SAP HANA environments.

In order to take the best out of Pure Storage vCentre Plugin for storage management, Validated Design also involves virtual server infrastructure with VMware vSphere 6.0.

There is also the Cisco Validated Design for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp, which has the ability to support 5000 users.

Another Validated Design for FlashStack includes Commvault’s data protection with added snapshot management, secondary storage with Cisco UCS S3260 storage servers, replication, active copy management and virtual machine archiving.

Pure Storage vice president of Asia-Pacific and Japan Michael Alp said: “We are always working to strengthen our relationships and integrations with technology partners to directly benefit our customers and channel partners. Our collaboration with Cisco, Citrix, Commvault, and SAP through the Cisco Validated Design program enables us to deliver the effortless, efficient and reliable experience our customers deserve.”

Rodney Hamill, Cisco Australia and New Zealand's data centre director said: "Because FlashStack allows organisations to upgrade capacity without downtime and deploy cloud-like capabilities to help ensure constant data access, it frees up IT staff to innovate.”

Pure Storage and Cisco promised to provide joint support for its channel partners focused on business-critical applications and structured workloads for the FlashArray product line and unstructured workloads

Another new announcement was the FlashStack solution with FlashArray//M and Cisco for compute and networking. The solution was tested using high-bandwidth workloads to meet specific query performance and scale requirements designated by the Microsoft SQL Server Performance team through SQL Server 2016 Data Warehouse Fast Track program.

The journalist travelled to Melbourne courtesy of Cisco.