Driving Faster, Better Decisions to Grow Asset Base

Nalluri Subba Rao, Senior Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations at MDC BMS, sees storage as the backbone of the company’s offerings. The company standardized its block storage on Pure Storage FlashArray to reduce TCO, focus IT resources on business-oriented tasks rather than storage management, and improve application performance.

Abu Dhabi’s success story has become a legend worldwide, and a linchpin of the present-day prosperity of the United Arab Emirates. The vision of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founding father of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi until 2004, was a future for his people full of opportunity and innovation.

Mubadala Investment Company has played a starring role in fulfilling that ambition, accelerating the emirate’s economic growth through laser-focused deployment of capital in 15 global sectors in 30 countries. With assets totaling US$226 billion, its broad portfolio permeates sectors from aerospace and healthcare to real estate and Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

A shared services company, MDC Business Management Services (MDC BMS) provides support in IT, Finance, Procurement, Facility Management and HR for the larger Mubadala Group, Abu Dhabi’s premier strategic investment company. MDC BMS provides expertise in several fields―with a strong focus on ICT—to the MubadalaGroup and external clients.

To support Mubadala Group and external clients, MDC BMS runs 16 applicaitons on 1,500 virtual servers, all on the same storage architecture. Each is mission-critical and performance-intensive, so each requires reactive speed. “Storage plays a vital role in any services you provide,” says Rao, an 11-year veteran of Mubadala. “Servers and analytics rely on storage; the performance of apps, the replication of data into your disaster-recovery center, your security―all rely on storage.”

Previously, the team faced several major challenges in delivering optimal performance to Mubadala and non-Mubadala clients. “We had multiple disk-based storage solutions,” he explains. “We managed seven storage arrays from multiple vendors, which ran to around seven racks, with a high TCO.”

Technical personnel had to schedule extended downtime periods for patching, fixing, and upgrading. The high rack space was also becoming an issue, and performance of the overall ICT infrastructure was sub-optimal.

To overcome these constraints on business efficiency and futureproof the infrastructure—not only for MDC BMS, but for the entire Mubadala Group and its clients―the team sought a solution that could deliver easier day-to-day management, reduced rack space and market-leading IOPS.

MDC BMS selected Pure Storage FlashArray products to cover production, non-production, disaster recovery and remote-sites operations. FlashArray//X is the world’s first all-flash, 100%-NVMe, shared, accelerated storage designed for mainstream enterprise deployments, and optimized for performance and density.