In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses demand a cloud infrastructure that is not only robust and high-performing but also cost-effective and easy to manage. When a global leader like Atos, with its 110,000 employees and €12 billion in annual revenue, needed to modernize and optimize its Virtual Oracle Computing (VOC) Hotel, they turned to a partner who could meet these demanding standards.
The Challenge: Legacy Storage and Growing Demands
The Atos VOC Hotel is a critical platform that runs the core workloads for customers in demanding industries like banking, healthcare, and government agencies. Atos faced five significant challenges with their existing storage solution:
- High Costs: They needed to maintain service quality while optimizing prices. The legacy system had a high total cost of ownership (TCO) due to expensive licenses and maintenance fees.
- Operational Burden: They needed to align their storage pricing with an operating-expenses (OpEx), pay-per-use model to match what was offered to their end customers.
- Performance Limitations: They needed to modernize their hardware to stay competitive and ensure their platform could deliver the performance their customers expected.
- Maintenance Disruptions: The solution had to always be online, which meant eliminating maintenance windows for hardware replacements and software upgrades.
- Complex Management: They needed to optimize the platform’s lifecycle and cost management.
The StorPool Solution: A Fully-Managed, High-Performance Platform
After a thorough evaluation, Hink Wiersema, Product Manager and Architect at Atos, chose StorPool Storage. He needed a storage solution that provides seamless integration with the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM), which StorPool accomplishes through its native plugin.StorPool’s software-defined storage solution converted their standard Dell servers with all-NVMe SSDs into primary storage systems that serve as the storage layer for the VOC Hotel.
The decision was based on the unmatched reliability and speed they observed from the StorPool system. As Hink Wiersema stated:
“The StorPool product is perfect from cost, flexibility (grow-as-you-go), and performance point of view. Second—and for us equally important—is the way the StorPool team helps us to build the most advanced hosting platform and their fast and committed support in case of an issue.”
The Results: A Partnership that Delivers Value
The implementation of StorPool Storage provided immediate and transformative benefits, demonstrating the clear added value of the partnership. Atos was able to replace hardware and perform software upgrades in-flight without impacting service availability. The company streamlined its operations by outsourcing the entire storage layer management to StorPool.
Key benefits for Atos included:
- Cost Reduction: A notable decrease in costs per TB for storage licenses and maintenance, leading to an overall TCO reduction.
- Improved Service Quality: Customers of the VOC Hotel experienced significant improvements in service quality and performance.
- Operational Efficiency: The team’s workload was lowered, allowing them to focus on creating and managing storage volumes.
- Always Online: The new platform delivered the always-online operating model that customers expected from a modern 24/7 hosting service.
By choosing StorPool, Atos not only solved its immediate challenges but also positioned its VOC Hotel for future success. The partnership showcases how a modern, agile, and fully managed storage solution can empower a global enterprise to streamline operations, reduce costs, and deliver superior service to its customers.