Top 10 storage deployment stories of 2019

Deployments reported on Computer Weekly in 2019 reflect the key trends in storage.

A big theme is a move away from traditional SAN and NAS architectures.

In particular, this is toward hyper-converged infrastructure (such as at Cranfield and Figeac Aero), which sees servers, storage and virtualisation hypervisors bundled together into nodes that can be built into scale-out clusters.

There’s also a certain prominence achieved by object storage (including at the National Library of Scotland and the University of Leicester). This is a relative newcomer to enterprise storage but one that’s well-suited to large stores of unstructured data.

Object storage is also “stateless”, which suits web applications and also allows customers to break free of the traditional SAN’s LUN-based configurations.

Finally, we see customers getting more out of their storage by deploying point performance solutions, such as at airline Hop, tackling virtual machine performance issues at Curo, and cutting storage costs in half at Northwestern University by classifying data and migrating it to less costly media.

Here are ComputerWeekly.com’s top 10 storage deployment stories of 2019.

1. National Library of Scotland says aye to Scality object storage

National digitised archives move off Hitachi SANs and Qualstar tape to Scality S3 object/file storage and a “no backup” strategy in a petabyte-scale deployment.

2. University of Bristol upgrades to Nimble as it takes IT off-site

Higher education institution gets trouble-free hybrid flash performance from Nimble and stores 600TB of data at two colocation sites to which it is transitioning from on-campus.

3. Figeac Aero manages growth with DataCore software-defined storage

Global roll-out sees DataCore software-defined storage deployed on Huawei hardware to HQ and 14 worldwide sites as aero parts maker copes with acquisition and expansion.

4. Hop jumps to Pure Storage to avoid big storage complexity

Air France short-haul and regional brand Hop jumps to Pure Storage after coming up against Dell EMC, NetApp and HPE, which all tried to sell it solutions ill-suited to its needs.

5. Cranfield gets Rubrik backup plus Nutanix in drive to the cloud

Research-led university goes hyper-converged across the board with Rubrik backup appliances and Nutanix in a move to rationalise on-site physical needs and drive to the cloud.

6. Steel firm adds steel to resilience with Scale hyper-converged

Carrs Tool Steels had to move on from legacy servers and found hyper-converged infrastructure from Scale Computing the ideal fit for a small business that couldn’t afford downtime.

7. Payday lender cuts troubleshooting by 30% with Virtual Instruments

Curo Financial thought storage was slowing down its websites, but found virtual machine and network issues were to blame. To fix this, it’s going proactive on storage performance issues.

8. University of Leicester dumps SANs and LUNs for Cloudian object storage

One-to-one mapping between Dell SANs and media servers had passed their sell-by date and caused vulnerabilities for the University of Leicester, which fixed the problems by a move to “stateless” object storage on Cloudian.

9. Northwestern cuts storage costs in half with Komprise

Komprise’s Deep Analytics helps university classify and migrate research data to cheaper disk and cloud as it cuts storage costs from $1.1m to $680,000 per annum.

10. French baby store modernises backup as Veeam handles 150TB a night

France-based maternity, baby and children’s store Orchestra needed to share IT resources between 700 points of sale across multiple time zones, and backup for 100 applications.