Neos meets the
specific storage needs
Case Study
Objective
Deliver storage solutions that will
support clients with high-availability,
high-transaction systems
Approach
Constantly watch the market to create
future roadmaps that match solutions
to client needs
IT Matters
• Delivers a 30-fold improvement in
operational latency
• Makes streaming I/O times five to
ten times better with a four-fold
improvement for random operations
• Dramatically reduces the time taken
to fulfil customers’ demands from
many hours to just minutes
Business Matters
• Delivers the agility, scalability and
simplicity to meet the ever changing
needs of many clients
• Reduces costs with deduplication rates
of between 1:2 and 1:3 and provides
customers with a better service per
Euro than larger solutions
• Supports eicient business growth
with a strong roadmap for the future
of a service provider
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20850 Storage
delivers vital performance and agility
How does an IT service
provider deliver storage
solutions that will meet
the varying needs of
multiple clients?
Performance and
agility are often as
important as capacity
and Munich-based
Neos has found the
answer with HPE 3PAR
StoreServ storage.
Challenge
Increased demands
When an enterprise selects a storage
solution for its own use it’s a comparatively
straightforward choice based on known or
anticipated requirements. However, when a
service provider must deliver storage for a
variable number of large clients with
diering needs, it’s a more complex and
unpredictable decision where agility and
performance are as important as capacity.
Munich-based Neos plays in this league.
This ten year old company started life as
a business consultancy but since 2008 has
moved into managed services, operating
high availability, high transaction systems
for some very big partners.
Case study
Neos
“Hewlett Packard Enterprise 3PAR StoreServ storage gives us the flexibility and
scalability to meet the ever increasing demands of our enterprise customers
who know what they need and push very heavily to get best-in-class service.
We believe that the 3PAR StoreServ storage devices we have acquired are part
of a well thought out strategy from HPE and that gives us confidence in the
future growth and direction that our customers will require.”
– Hendrik van den Berg, managing director, Neos
Industry
IT Service Provision
Page 2
One of these is Amadeus which provides
technology solutions to the airline industry
and as a result many of Neos’ end-customers
are major airlines. Its current storage
requirements are roughly 400TB and
at a density of 1:1,000 Input/Output
Operations Per Second (IOPS) for each
terabyte, this equates to 400,000 IOPS.
“We provide the operational services of IT.
We are responsible for ensuring that CIOs
and application developers are able to
deliver on the promise of agility and
continuous deployment by bringing
automation and virtualisation into what
we provide. Like plumbers of the IT world,
we enable these complex solutions to run
smoothly,” says Neos’ managing director,
Hendrik van den Berg. “We don’t provide
services at the low end. We’re not in the
volumes game. We provide services
to customers who have very high
requirements in terms of performance,
availability and security.”
Neos rents space in two Munich data
centres connected by dark fibre. It also has
space in a Singapore facility, which is used
as a regional hub. With additional sta in
Bangkok and Bratislava, it has built a global
operations team across Europe and APAC.
“Because of the way we work we can support
anyone in any country in those regions
through remote management,” explains
van den Berg.
The way that Neos operates is to build
flexible blocks of technology that can be
easily rolled out to accommodate new clients
or increased demands, and Hewlett Packard
Enterprise solutions are core components.
The relationship started some years ago
with HPE LeftHand storage combined
with the latest HPE rack servers and
HPE BladeSystem c3000 then c7000
enclosures. Two years ago, the company
moved from HPE LeftHand devices to
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7200 storage, then
followed that with an additional 3PAR
StoreServ 7400 system.
“The 3PARs were a natural progression
for us in terms of the complexity of
requirements from our customers.
We’ve been following a roadmap where
we are continuously expanding and moving
up in terms of being able to supply specific
requirements, but we needed a new storage
device because our 3PARs were rapidly
running out of space,” says van den Berg.
“With the need to support 50 per cent yearly
growth in the business we had also started
to move into a dierent ball game with even
newer and higher challenges from our
customers. We needed to take a big
step up in terms of performance.”
System requirements had scaled up by
more than 300 per cent in 18 months due
to the heavy growth of applications and data
projects. With heavy streaming workloads on
services like data warehousing, a new solution
was needed to avoid hitting bottlenecks.
Case study
Neos
Industry
IT Service Provision
Page 3
30x
Improvement in latency
Solution
Scalable agility
Neos has worked for many years with
its trusted advisor, the HPE partner Kite
Consult, and together they sought a solution
that would continue to deliver the necessary
performance and quality-of-service the
business required. Their decision was to
remain in the 3PAR camp with a new
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20850 Storage
installation at one of the Munich locations.
It has four controllers, expandable to eight
providing up to 1.86 million IOPS. It’s an All
Flash array which enables Neos to step away
from adaptive optimisation and gives it the
capability to create a federation of storage
devices, using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ
20850 as a core hub with the flexibility
to move workloads around from device
to device.
Among many business critical applications
supported by the 3PAR are Oracle Database
Real Application Clusters (RAC), Microsoft®
SQL database management systems and
solutions from Siebel, Informatica, Cognos
and CEM Systems.
“It also allows us to build business models
from dierent components that provide
an IT landscape to match what we require.
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20850 is also a huge
step up in the sense of pure IOPS that
you can distribute across the disks and
that’s important because our customers
do not require space as much as
high-levels of performance.”
Florian Wanner, partner at Kite Consult adds:
“We found that 3PAR was the right option,
performance-wise because it provides all
the enterprise capabilities that we require
as well as speed and value for money. The
idea behind our use of HPE 3PAR StoreServ
20850 is that you get away from tiering in
terms of having dierent types of disks.
We basically have one flat tier and this
scales better from the operational aspect.
The less operational burden and the less
the complexity, the higher the reliability.
It’s all about simplicity and most of the
aspects are handled by the 3PAR StoreServ
itself without any administrative intervention.
Just having one flat tier also enables us to
use deduplication.”
“Working with Kite, we are always evaluating
other options in the market and in this
particular case we were extremely convinced
that the HPE technology was good enough
to stand up against the competitors. The
general architecture and buying strategy
was in line with the best that is out there in
the market,” says van den Berg. “The 3PARs
provide us with the ability to create a future
roadmap with the flexibility to be able to
meet changing and varying performance
requirements from our customers.“
Benefit
Higher performance at lower cost
An important advantage for Neos is that this
powerful and flexible storage infrastructure
gives it the agility to meet the ever changing
needs of a service provider. The time taken
to fulfil customer performance demands has
been dramatically shortened.
Case study
Neos
Industry
IT Service Provision
Customer at a glance
Applications
Oracle Database Real Application
Clusters (RAC), Microsoft® SQL
database management systems and
solutions from Siebel, Informatica,
Cognos and CEM Systems
Hardware
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 20850 Storage
Software
• HPE 3PAR Priority Optimization
“We can combine the HPE 3PAR StoreServ with other
devices and move data around. It forms a very strong
hub in the middle of the overall architecture. Linking
the devices in this way increases availability and
simplifies risk management.”
– Hendrik van den Berg, managing director, Neos
Our solution partners
With traditional methods it would take many
hours or days to plan, followed by several
days of change management and many
hours to actually implement the change.
HPE 3PAR StoreServ requires no complex
change management. It takes a minute
to read the ticket and five seconds to do.
Deployment is also more straightforward,
being achieved through a workflow as part
of the standard operations.
Latency is another important area of
improvement. In its early days, Neos was
achieving eight to ten milliseconds on 10K
but with Solid State Drives (SSD) this was
reduced to about three milliseconds with
mixed workloads. Now it’s down to between
0.2 and 0.3 milliseconds, or 30 times better.
Also, streaming I/O is between five and ten
times better and there is a fourfold
improvement for random operations.
Although this was not a major point for
Neos, the Flash system also saves on
power. It consumes 1.2KW to a maximum
of 2KW at peak whereas the older 3PAR
StoreServ 7400, which has the same
capacity, consumes approximately 7KW.
Two deduplication layers also reduce the
amount of saved data achieving ratios of 1:2
up to 1:3 on top of thin provisioning gains.
“When we started with some of our
customers they were just seeing storage as
space. We have had to educate them that
the data warehouse consists of quite a few
dierent types of processes. Each of these
has a completely dierent profile that must
be matched in their storage and HPE 3PAR
StoreServ has given us the ability to optimise
the storage for these processes. By using
HPE 3PAR StoreServ our customers can get
a better service per Euro than they would
get if they went for big machines. It’s about
being able to find a storage device that gives
you an extreme level of performance but
also scalability and the ability to manage the
dierent workloads and storage together,”
concludes van den Berg.
“The HPE general storage evolution and
next steps are in line with the philosophy
that fits with our business direction and
what we have to be able to oer our
customers. It’s a complete package that is
the attractive part of this and we believe
that the vision of HPE in this whole area of
storage is what makes sense. It’s what our
customers require and it’s what we require.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/storage
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© Copyright 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.
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4AA6-3836EEW, February 2016
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