CASE STUDY
Vox Telecom delivers impressive business benefits with the InfiniBox enterprise storage system from Infinidat
Keith Laaks, Executive Head for Technology, at Vox Telecom.
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bout Vox Telecom
Vox provides connectivity, communications, security, cloud services, virtual compute capacity, individual virtual machines, data centre solutions and more to the southern African market, with offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein. The company’s offering is aimed at the consumer, small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and large enterprise market sectors. Vox’s connectivity services are available throughout the country, supported with networking infrastructure, which is operated out of eight data centres. Two of these data centres are used to manage the compute, storage and virtualisation software necessary for delivering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to hundreds of Vox’s customers. The largest consumer of resources on the platform is Vox itself, whereby the company makes use of the infrastructure to host and run hundreds of internal systems and many customer-facing applications, such as
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email. The reliability and performance of the storage platform is pivotal for these functions and is a critical component of the Storage Area Network (SAN) and virtualisation solutions.
The challenge At the start of 2019, Vox faced two significant difficulties around its existing storage platform. Firstly, the five-year maintenance period was coming to an end, and secondly, the company was running out of capacity much faster than anticipated. Adding to these issues, Vox was unable to utilise the full capacity of its existing storage solution, as some 40TB needed to remain ‘unused’ for the system to function. “We reached the capacity limit of the system faster than anticipated. Coupled with the prohibitively expensive maintenance extension option, we made the decision to perform a technology refresh and replace the platform with a completely new solution,” explained Keith Laaks, Executive Head for Technology, at Vox.
SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA NOVEMBER – DECEMBER 2020
The solution Vox needed a cost-effective, highperformance storage array for its hosting environment in order to assist the business to meet customer demands and rampant data growth. An agile partner, who would be able to deliver quickly, was also a necessity. After evaluating 12 different storage arrays on criteria such as performance, Inputs/Outputs Per Second (IOPS), storage efficiencies, compression, deduplication and redundancy, Vox selected the InfiniBox solution from Infinidat, supplied by local partner and solutions integrator, Datacentrix. “Datacentrix prides itself on operating within the top three tiers for all its technology partners and provides Tier 1 partner services for Infinidat in the South African market. Our formal customer engagement approach is underpinned by our technical expertise and business advisory services, ensuring best-fit solutions for our clients. As the technical delivery partner throughout the InfiniBox implementation, we delivered all the pre-sales requirements, including
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