Casio Japan has reduced its storage expenditure thanks to a solution comprising Red Hat Storage, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM System x servers.
By combining virtualized industry-standard servers with open software-defined storage, Casio now has a highly available and agile storage solution that can accommodate heavy data workloads by scaling to petabytes.
Casio deployed Red Hat Storage into its existing infrastructure comprising Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM System x3650 servers to cut its storage costs and to avoid inflexible vendor lock-in.
Casio Computer previously used monolithic storage hardware and software that became expensive because the operation and maintenance had to be entrusted to the vendor.
IBM System x servers with Red Hat solutions were used to provide the backbone for the virtualized environment to offer reliability and support for new digital capabilities focused on increasing sales and visibility of Casio’s clock, digital cameras and tablets products.
Red Hat Storage acts as a data-store of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, the open datacenter virtualization solution built on industry-leading performance of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.
Within two years, Casio slashed its storage costs in half by integrating the internal storage disks of multiple servers and using it as one large storage pool that is accessible through the virtualized server.
The Red Hat Storage management console provides a simplified and unified way to manage both the storage and virtualized server environments for optimized performance.
Kazuyasu Yamazaki, group manager of the IT Infrastructure Group at Casio Information Service, said: “By deploying Red Hat Storage with Red Hat Virtualization running on IBM x series servers, we were finally able to build a storage environment at a low cost while using commodity servers.”
“Our costs, including various procurement costs and operating fees, fell to less than half of what we had been spending before implementing Red Hat Storage. And, our IT usage was by no means optimal or efficient. We were locked in by vendors’ proprietary storage hardware technologies, so we couldn’t manipulate the system ourselves,” Yamazaki added.
