E.ON IS UK, founded in January 2006, is a subsidiary of E.ON IS GmbH. With a team of over 400 employees, E.ON IS UK is the IT shared service provider for E.ON UK. Keen to optimise the energy efficiency of its data centre and create a virtualised, easy-to-manage storage environment, it worked with Hitachi Data Systems to devise a migration strategy. By incorporating additional capacity and using Hitachi software to migrate data, it has simplified its storage management and improved its business performance.

With the volume of data being stored across its IT environment increasing, E.ON IS UK was challenged with balancing the requirement for more capacity with demands from its customer base to provide high levels of service and reliability. Adding extra capacity to its platform had traditionally been a time-consuming and complex process, which could impact its end users' productivity. Loss of productivity can mean a drop in customer service, and in the competitive utilities industry, customer satisfaction is an imperative ingredient of success. The company therefore needed to address this issue quickly but cost effectively.

The IT team reviewed its storage environment with a view to increasing its capacity-to-power ratio while consolidating its existing resources.

Head of Storage UK at E.ON IS, Peter Arrell explains: "We already had a tiered storage architecture in place but were finding that it was hard to maintain visibility of capacity use and availability, so we weren't using it to the best advantage. Adding to this complexity, we had standalone storage environments for some parts of the business. We wanted to bring all these resources together with one central point of management to simplify our role and speed up the response time to requests for capacity from the business."

In order to achieve this, Arrell and his team devised a strategy to consolidate its storage systems into a single virtual environment.

Building on Strong Foundations

E.ON IS UK had recently deployed a tiered storage architecture based on technology from Hitachi Data Systems. Its key business critical business applications were stored in its "top" storage tier, based on a Hitachi Universal Storage PlatformTM. Other applications and its development environment were supported by the second and third storage tiers, which sat on Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 1000 and Hitachi Workgroup Modular Storage 100 systems, respectively.

"We were pleased with the performance of our new storage tiers and wanted to develop this solution further to really enhance our energy efficiency and responsiveness," says Arrell.

The team decided to migrate the data on its third storage tier onto the Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage system with SATA disk drives in order to benefit from its greater capacity and performance. This would enable them to also migrate the data currently stored in other places into the tiered environment while leaving capacity to support continued business growth.

Taking the Right Approach

A challenge was posed by the planned migration, however, as it needed to be completed without any downtime for the business critical applications that were being migrated. "It was so important that our overhaul of the storage environment did not have any negative impact on the business," Arrell says. "So we spoke to consultants from Hitachi Data Systems to clarify the options available to us. They helped us evaluate our storage requirements with the goal of reducing our overall operational expenditure and storage TCO while fitting our plans in with the overall business objectives."

The resulting approach was that E.ON IS UK leveraged Hitachi software products on a temporary basis, as a tool enabled service, to complete its storage restructuring. Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager software provided an easy-to-use interface that enabled the non-disruptive movement of data volumes with complete transparency to the end user. Meanwhile, Hitachi Universal Volume Manager software was used to enable the storage team to virtualise its tiered storage environment behind the Universal Storage Platform.

"We were really impressed by the dedication and expertise of the consultants from Hitachi Data Systems who worked with us on the migration," comments Arrell. "The company's heritage of working with large enterprises like E.ON IS means they understood our priorities and challenges well and had the technical know-how and solutions to address them. They provided invaluable onsite support throughout the project."

Reaping the Benefits

The storage team at E.ON IS UK could see improvements both for themselves and the business immediately. Throughout the migration they received no reports of any degradation in performance or response time from any of the users of the system, showing that they had been successful in consolidating the environment without impacting availability or service levels.

The enhanced performance of the consolidatedn platform has resulted in improved response times for key business applications. At the same time, the greater capacity available within the storage tiers means that E.ON IS UK

is now in an even better position to accommodate the further growth of its customer base.

Another key benefit of the new infrastructure is its simplified management. "The efficiency of our storage administrators and the capacity of our estate has been drastically improved thanks to the virtualised, consolidated platform," states Arrell. "The time and skill set needed to carry out basic maintenance and upkeep of the system has been reduced, as now it can all be done through the Universal Storage Platform using one simple interface. This means our IT staff can focus their talents on more business critical projects and on driving innovation."

By consolidating and virtualising its existing storage resources, E.ON IS UK has been able to reduce the costs involved in running its IT environment while enhancing its performance.

"In the current economic climate, making the most of the capacity we already have rather than investing in a lot more hardware is the most sensible approach, and with Hitachi Data Systems help we've managed to do just that. We're getting more out of our storage environment now through more effective tiering and administration, with less operational cost," says Arrell.

Hitachi software on a tool enabled service basis in the future as its storage needs evolve. "We've found that this model gives us the best of both worlds," Arrell concludes. "We can benefit from the industry leading functionality that Hitachi offers but only need to invest in it when we need to, meaning we're able to operate our storage environment as economically as possible."

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