Overview

Gijima is one of South Africa’s leading ICT companies, providing cloud infrastructure, IT and outsourcing services for both enterprise clients and small to medium businesses. A proudly 100% Black-owned company with Level 1 BBBEE status, Gijima employs 3,000 people across 16 regions, and serves over 1,000 satisfied clients.

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

Gijima’s Tier-3 data center hosts business-critical systems for many of their biggest clients. When they acquired the data center, it came with most of the existing server and storage infrastructure, but much of the storage was reaching end-of-life. Gijima needed an upgrade to improve performance, manageability, and sustainability, all while not disrupting their client’s systems. Gijima also wanted to be able to offer on-demand scalability at an attractive price – signaling their need for a partner that can offer flexible commercial models.

The Solution

Gijima chose Hitachi Vantara as their trusted partner to resolve their challenges with data storage. Hitachi Vantara was able to provide non-disruptive migration tools, with flexible models that allowed them to only pay for the storage capacity they needed. Not only is this efficient, but it’s also improved their sustainable data management practices.

The results

With the installation of all-flash storage systems, Gijima was able to replace bulkier spinning-disk arrays, significantly consolidating the physical infrastructure. Before, they had nine racks in the production data center and after, they were able to shift to three – while freeing up an additional two racks at the disaster recovery site. Overall, performance and user experience were significantly improved, with faster execution of long-running batch processes and application response time dropping to sub-milliseconds. 

They also saw significant cost savings, as Hitachi Vantara’s EverFlex pricing model allows them to only pay for the storage that they actually use (which saw a significant decrease). With the physical consolidation of their infrastructure, they are able to support their sustainability goals with energy efficient solutions that reduce power, cooling, and space requirements.

Metrics

• Slim down its total data landscape by about 25%
• 66% reduction in power, cooling, and space requirements, with a similar impact at the disaster recovery site

The Technology

• Two Hitachi VSP 5000 Series arrays at their production data center
• Two VSP G700 arrays for disaster recovery.
• The nondisruptive migration feature of Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System RF and Hitachi TrueCopy Remote Replication software
• Adoption of Hitachi Ops Center including:
  • Administrator for storage management and provisioning
  • Analyzer for reporting and analytics
  • Protector for data protection and replication management

Disruptive Factor

This project has been game-changing for Gijima. Traditional data storage infrastructure has a high level of energy consumption and can greatly impact the environment. With the implementation of Hitachi Vantara’s storage solutions, Gijima has been able to reduce their data landscape and power requirements and can now highlight the fact that their data infrastructure supports their overarching sustainability goals – overall minimizing their environmental impact.

Shining Moment

Gijima has saved high levels of time and effort on their storage management processes. Once a tedious task, their reporting storage performance and capacity is no longer manually processed in spreadsheets and data exports but has been tasked down to just a few mouse clicks. With Hitachi Vantara solutions, they have also been able to improve their management of replication and backups, with block-level rolling snapshots for open systems, and both synchronous and asynchronous replication for the mainframe.