Software-Defined Storage selected by leading European engineering company to revitalise IT systems

With customers in various industries including manufacturing, energy and the public sector, Goodtech develops and delivers projects and services through the integration of sustainable solutions. Initially established in Sweden in 1913, the company now employs more than 1,500 people in over 40 locations in Norway, Sweden and Åland. Examples of customers in Sweden are AstraZeneca, LKAB, NCC, PEAB, Trafikverket, Vattenfall and Volvo.

With its incumbent storage solution reaching the end of its life, Goodtech worked with Layer 8 IT-Services, its technology partner, to find a new storage platform that could keep total cost of ownership (TCO) low while delivering high performance, stability and functionality. After initially testing NexentaStor in a controlled environment, Goodtech chose to deploy a Nexenta solution, running on Dell servers, with a NexentaStor High Availability (HA) Cluster to manage, control and protect its data.
Goodtech’s virtualised environment hosts hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) and its data is stored across two data centers. It is vital that Goodtech’s IT infrastructure is supported by a reliable, high performance storage platform that can be scaled appropriately to keep up with capacity demand and ensure business continuity.
“We were initially attracted to Nexenta because of its ZFS based, open source set up that could be adapted to fit our exact needs, and stop us from being tied down to one vendor,” said Anders Hellquist, Senior Systems Engineer at Goodtech. “After comparing it to a number of other offerings, we implemented Nexenta as we were amazed at the cost saving that could be achieved and it now provides us with a rock-solid foundation to build upon.”

“Goodtech started the journey towards Software-Defined Storage by installing a test-environment with NexentaStor to evaluate functionality, scalability and performance. During their tests they not only found it was enterprise class storage, it also outperformed the current storage in performance and scalability. This made it very easy for Goodtech to take the next step and replace their primary storage platform with NexentaStor,” said Johan Tungström, CEO, Layer 8 IT-Services.
Mark Jordan, EMEA VP at Nexenta, said: “Goodtech is a prime example of a business that can benefit from Software-Defined Storage. When a legacy solution reaches the end of its life, an SDS alternative is the most flexible platform on offer in terms of cost and scalability and avoids enterprises suffering from vendor lock-in in the future. Goodtech has started its journey into the Software-Defined world, and are already reaping the rewards. “