Building a modern, resilient storage platform

As the state’s IT leader, the Maryland Department of Information Technology (DoIT) manages and provides information technology and telecommunications services and critical support to state agencies, the Executive Office of the Governor, coordinating offices, and independent Executive Branch agencies. DoIT provides cybersecurity, digital, data governance, AI enablement, infrastructure, and platform services to its partner agencies, ensuring the State of Maryland is more secure, productive, and accessible.

Established more than 15 years ago, the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) is continually evolving its service portfolio to meet the needs of government agencies across the State of Maryland. The organization offers infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and backup-as-a-service (BaaS) solutions, providing virtualized environments for agencies to run, protect, and back up key systems.

Darrell Stevens, Systems Architect on the Data Center team at DoIT, says: “Our user requirements are always changing, and that means our technology requirements are changing, too. To help us serve a diverse community of stakeholders, we are continually looking to expand and enhance our storage.”

In the past, DoIT relied on a heterogeneous storage environment to underpin its IaaS and BaaS platforms. It was based on disk arrays, conventional solid-state drives, and hyperconverged infrastructure. As time went by, these storage systems became increasingly costly and time-consuming to manage and scale.

“It used to take hours to restore our virtual machines, and disk failures were almost a weekly occurrence,” continues Stevens. “As our various legacy storage systems approached end-of-life, we looked for a replacement that would be simpler to manage and provide the headroom for long-term data growth while also incorporating features such as cyber resilience.”

To support a new generation of shared services, DoIT selected Everpure solutions. For its BaaS environment, the organization uses Everpure Evergreen//One, a storage-as-a-service platform that enables simplified operations with guaranteed performance. To underpin its IaaS offering, DoIT uses FlashArray//X20 and FlashArray//X70 solutions, delivering dense, power-efficient all-NVMe storage.

“Whether we are designing a WAN or building a new data center, everything we do is guided by our five strategic pillars: performance, availability, resilience, budget, and value,” explains Stevens. “When I did a test drive of the Everpure solution, I was constantly looking for the catch but couldn’t see a single flaw. The Everpure Platform aligns perfectly with all our strategic pillars.”

For DoIT, one of the most important advantages of moving to the Everpure Platform is its simplicity. 

Stevens comments: “When we looked at solutions from other vendors—including our incumbent providers—we found that they all used different storage array software across their block, object, and file systems. With Everpure, we can use Purity storage array software to manage all our solutions from a single point of control. Purity significantly reduces our training and management workloads and lays the foundations for creating an Enterprise Data Cloud [EDC] in the future.”

Working with Everpure, DoIT sized and configured the new storage environment.

“One thing I really love about Everpure is that they give us real data reduction numbers—they never try and muddy the waters by bringing thin provisioning into the equation,” says Stevens. “The Everpure team was very knowledgeable, and their input helped us iterate the design until we were 100% happy with it.”

After racking and cabling the new Everpure FlashArray solutions, DoIT was up and running with its first virtual machines in less than an hour.

“I’ve been working in storage for 20 years, and I’ve never experienced a simpler deployment,” recalls Stevens. “We were up and running in about 40 minutes, and some of that time was spent finding a replacement for a faulty USB cable. The ethos of simplicity extends to everything that Everpure does—even their bill of materials, which was just three lines long.”

By standardizing on the Everpure Platform, DoIT is enhancing scalability and security while minimizing the cost and effort of day-to-day management. In fact, Everpure solutions have allowed DoIT to cut the time spent on storage administration in half.

“Whenever we troubleshoot an issue, fine-grained monitoring data from our Pure1® storage management solution lets us quickly rule out storage as a cause,” says Stevens. “As we move toward an EDC, our ambition is to build automated workflows for common storage management tasks, which will help us keep our environment consistent and well organized.”

With an Evergreen//Forever™ subscription for its Everpure FlashArray solutions, DoIT gains the peace of mind that the platform will grow seamlessly with its long-term storage needs.

“As custodians of public budgets, we strive to be responsible and use funds wisely,” explains Stevens. “With Evergreen//Forever, we will be able to upgrade our storage environment extremely cost-effectively and with zero disruption to our end users when the time comes.”

DoIT is now migrating data to the Everpure Platform, with the ultimate aim of decommissioning all of its legacy arrays. 

“We are around 70% of the way through our first data migration to the Everpure FlashArray solutions,” confirms Stevens. “The storage efficiencies we’re getting are incredible. We’ve improved our data reduction ratio from 1.97:1 to 3.1:1. This represents a substantial storage capacity reduction—and so far, the arrays are only 12% utilized because of superior data reduction technologies from Everpure.”

Low-latency flash storage now allows DoIT to recover data significantly faster, and a planned expansion of its Everpure platform will help strengthen data resilience further still.

“In our old environment, recovering some virtual machines took hours,” Stevens comments. “Today, we can recover our systems in minutes—strengthening the ‘availability’ pillar of our strategic plan. Next, we will deploy Everpure FlashArray//C™ for our NAS environments, with asynchronous replication to enhance our data resilience.”

DoIT is committed to delivering its services in an environmentally sustainable way. By embracing ultra-efficient, all-NVMe flash solutions from Everpure, the organization is unlocking major efficiency improvements in its data centers.

“The density of FlashArray is mind-blowing,” adds Stevens. “We’ve cut our data center Tier 0/1 storage footprint from 77U to just 3U and reduced our data center power utilization from 28kW to 1.6kW. Everpure is helping us to cut our energy consumption in the data center by 94%, which contributes to our sustainability goals.”

The combination of efficient, high-performance storage and the Evergreen//Forever subscription model will help DoIT unlock massive cost savings in the years ahead.

“Compared to renewing our legacy IaaS storage system, the Everpure solution is less than half the cost per terabyte,” says Stevens. “Over a five-year period, Everpure will save us in excess of $1 million—while giving us around a 75% reduction in storage latency.”

To build ever-more resilient and efficient storage, DoIT plans to collaborate with Everpure to create an EDC.

“Together with our stakeholders, we are constantly innovating our digital services,” concludes Stevens. “Everpure gives us the secure, high-performance platform our partners need to deliver key public services to Marylanders.”