Scalable flash storage handles continued data growth at Gratte Brothers

The organisation
Gratte Brothers is one of the UK’s leading independently owned building services companies.

Founded almost 70 years ago as an electrical contractor, the Group has expanded to offer a complete range of services for the design, installation and maintenance of mechanical and electrical services, security systems and commercial catering facilities. It employs over 650 personnel and has a turnover in excess of £100,000,000 per annum.

The business need
Gratte Brothers generates large volumes of data from its design services. The company had two four year old Compellent SANs which were nearing capacity, one in its head office and the second at a back-up site. It approached Dell Compellent to enquire about the cost of expanding the SANs, and was advised that this was not possible; the SANs were at the end of their life and would have to be replaced.

“When we bought the SANs, our original forecast was that we would need more shelves after three years, so their capacity had outlasted our original estimates,” explained Mike Mahoney, group IT manager at Gratte Brothers. “However, we had planned to expand them by adding more shelves. We didn’t expect to have to replace them completely. So we decided to go out to the market and take a fresh look at everything that was available.”

Gratte Brothers researched a range of potential storage vendors before drawing up a shortlist of three who appeared to offer the robust solution they were looking for at a competitive price. Then a wildcard emerged – hybrid storage arrays from Tegile. “They were a new, untested company and no-one had heard of them,” explained Mike. “We liked the way their systems were put together – it felt like they were built from the ground up to use current technology, rather than grafting that technology onto an older system. They also offered features such as inline deduplication, compression and file snapshot recovery which would help to handle data growth and improve resilience.

“All the other solutions had both pros and cons, but the Tegile solution ticked all the boxes, and we negotiated on price to bring it within our budget.”

The solution
After deciding on their vendor, Gratte Brothers needed a company to integrate the new arrays with their existing infrastructure. They turned to Fordway, who were one of the first companies in the UK to partner with Tegile.

“We have a track record in identifying and working with challenger brands who offer a step change in technology,” explains Richard Blanford, Fordway’s managing director. “Many companies are nervous of what they perceive as taking a risk with an unknown vendor, however exciting their product offer. But by doing so they can miss out on opportunities to innovate, improve productivity and cut costs. What Tegile offers is highly scalable flash and hybrid storage at a very competitive price. We’re vendor agnostic and are always looking for innovative technology for different applications. When we came across Tegile we quickly decided that it would be a good addition to our portfolio.

“In this case, Mike and his team had chosen their storage solution, and our job was to make it work seamlessly. Gratte Bothers already had a virtualised environment and that’s exactly what Tegile storage is designed for, so the implementation was very straightforward.”

The first stage was to set up and test the Tegile arrays at Gratte Brothers’ headquarters near Kings Cross in London. Fordway and Tegile began by migrating a small system before moving all the data across. A week later Tegile did the same at Gratte Brother’s data centre at Slough. Here the fully virtualised systems meant that the Tegile storage could be connected directly to the host system. It has plug-ins to enable it to tie in seamless to virtualised equipment such as VCentre from VMWare, which was not possible with the other storage solutions Gratte Brothers had considered. There was no need for any fibre switches – the team simply used the existing fibre at the Kings Cross site.

“The whole process was remarkably quick. It took just two weeks from making the purchase decision to delivery,” said Damien Silman, senior systems administrator at Gratte Brothers. “Fordway then arrived on site, carried out the implementation and left the same day with everything running smoothly. In our view that’s perfect – exactly how we like it!”

The benefits
The Tegile hybrid storage arrays provide a number of useful features. As well as being highly scalable to handle future data growth, they provide immediate deduplication and compression to increase usable capacity.

Mike and Damien quickly realised that the reports from their old SANs had been inaccurate as they were measuring capacity speed, not average speed. “The reports from the old SANs were showing spare processor capacity, but once we installed the Tegile storage we could see that the demand was greater in terms of performance than we had been able to meet,” explained Damien. “However, this is no longer a problem. When a slow drive is at capacity, the system begins to use the fast drive, so data is constantly being moved around and we can see where it is.

“We’d been like a Formula One car with an engine limiter set. Users either thought things were running normally or slowly. Taking away that limiter means that complaints have stopped, and the CAD operators seem a lot happier now they’re not suffering from what we called ‘slowdown syndrome’.”

Next steps
Gratte Brothers have been using the new storage for three months now. They are planning to implement new systems, including a higher performance SharePoint solution, which will create increasing demand for storage, but are confident that their new systems will be able to cope. They have the visibility to see how storage is being used, and are planning ahead to add additional capacity when they start to approach the current thresholds.

“This hybrid storage is a perfect fit with Gratte Brothers’ needs,” concludes Fordway’s Richard Blanford. “Storage running at or close to capacity can significantly reduce productivity as employees wait for a response. Mike and Damien have chosen an innovative solution which should meet their needs for many years to come.”