Keeping Critical Trading Systems Online 24/7

Overview

Challenge

• Replace aging storage for mission-critical trading data without disrupting 24/7 business operations.

Solution

• Worked with Hitachi Vantara to deploy Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 1090 and VSP One Block 28 solutions with active/active replication.

Outcome

• Achieved zero-downtime data migration and 7.6:1 data compression — delivering cost-effective and highly available storage for critical systems.

Challenge

Employing more than 600 people across five continents, Danske Commodities connects energy producers and large-scale consumers to wholesale energy markets. They are a leading trading company with 14,000 megawatts (MW) in assets under contract in over 40 global markets.

Danske Commodities operates in an industry where speed is critical. They must gather, analyze, and act on energy pricing data from energy trading exchanges in multiple countries. Just minutes of IT downtime can result in millions of dollars of business disruption.

Patrick Quist Strieker, IT Systems Engineer, Danske Commodities, confirms, “Our core applications demand particularly high performance when it comes to storage. So, when our previous storage infrastructure approached end of life, we targeted a performant and highly available replacement.”

Alongside these requirements, Danske Commodities aimed to transition to the new platform with minimal business disruption.

“We are a 24/7 business, and our mission-critical SQL environment needs to be online at all times,” adds Strieker. “For that reason, we wanted an expert partner to support us during the migration and cutover.”

Solution

After a thorough review of storage offerings from several market-leading vendors, Danske Commodities decided to replace its existing environment with two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 1090 arrays. Deployed across two data centers and replicated using Hitachi global-active device (GAD) technology, the new active/active configuration helps ensure the highest levels of data resilience and availability.

“As well as having one of the best price-performance ratios of all the providers we considered, Hitachi offered extremely responsive local support via their partner Codeex — a key factor in our decision-making process,” comments Strieker.

Working closely with the Danske Commodities IT team, Hitachi Vantara helped to plan and execute the migration of 300TB of data and manage the subsequent go-live process.

“Hitachi’s 100% Data Availability Guarantee gave us a great deal of reassurance,” says Strieker. “With assistance from Hitachi we switched over to the new storage exactly according to our cutover plan.”

Based on the excellent performance of Hitachi VSP arrays, Danske Commodities began consolidating its test and development environments on the new storage platform. As demand for data-driven services grew, the company saw that IOPS, and throughput demands on the platform were rising sharply.

“To feed growing appetites for data, we decided to shift our test and development data to a separate storage platform,” recalls Strieker. “We were so impressed with our Hitachi VSP arrays that there was never a question about who we were going to choose for our next project.”

Teaming up again with experts from Hitachi and Codeex, Danske Commodities deployed two next-generation VSP One Block 28 solutions alongside its existing arrays, delivering a total of around 1PB of raw storage.

“Moving our test and development data from our Hitachi VSP 1090 arrays to the new VSP One Block solutions was simple and seamless,” says Strieker. “The Hitachi team set up the new arrays and moved the data across in no time at all, and with zero disruption.”

Outcome

Today, Danske Commodities uses Hitachi solutions to deliver resilient, high-performance storage to its international business.

“We are a data-driven company, and our analysts are always exploring new ways to leverage that data to uncover commercial opportunities,” says Strieker. “With Hitachi, we’ve built a rock-solid storage platform that is available 24/7.”

As its business data grows, Danske Commodities uses Hitachi compression and deduplication technology to help it make its storage investments go further.

“We were sure that the compression ratios we’d get from our new Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One Block solutions would be good, but we were totally blown away by what we’ve actually achieved,” says Strieker. “We’re consuming just 30TB of raw storage for around 280TB of development and test data — a compression ratio of approximately 7.6:1.”

Looking ahead, Danske Commodities sees its partnership with Hitachi and Codeex continuing for years to come.

“What I really enjoy about working with Hitachi is that there’s always someone there to help us when we need it,” Strieker concludes. “If we have a question, we get the answer quickly.”