FlashArrays Reduce Client Provisioning Time

Customer:

Afrihost started life in South Africa in 2000 as a web design and internet service provider for small and medium businesses. As it grew, the ISP, brainchild of three close friends, added ADSL broadband internet connections, domain services and more, becoming one of the top three ADSL providers in South Africa and winning MyBroadband’s ISP of the Year four years running. The company has evolved into a managed service provider, while also building one of the largest ADSL networks in the region. Despite its phenomenal growth, Afrihost has built a solid reputation as the most affordable service provider in Africa, relying on storage efficiencies to deliver both low cost and high performance.

Challenges:

• Exponential customer growth on slowing HDD storage arrays
• High $/TB cost for RAID10 configuration due to huge VM load on HDD arrays
• Customers have no long term contracts - outstanding service is critical to company

Use Case:

• Virtualization

Business Transformation:

• Provisioning time cut from 30 minutes to one minute
• No support calls, five nines reliability

IT Transformation:

• Two datacenters running VMware vSphere on blade servers
• 47TB Pure Storage FlashArray 450
• 3.6:1 Data Reduction