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K3 Starcom reduces costs and improves performance 33% using Zadara.

With Zadara, Starcom gained the benefits of an OpEx pay-as-you-go model, while retaining control by having the infrastructure reside inside its own data centers.

About the company.

K3 Starcom provides on-premises and cloud solutions as well as technical support, consultancy and systems integration services.

The challenge.

Starcom is the UK’s leading supplier of integrated business systems for the retail, manufacturing and distribution sectors. Like many other corporate IT organizations, they were facing a refresh cycle of their storage hardware. As part of a strategic IT infrastructure review, Starcom investigated the leading enterprise storage vendors for alternative solutions to their existing legacy arrays. The goal was to break away from the three- to five-year cycle of CapEx infrastructure refresh and see if there was a realistic OpEx alternative.

The solution.
A replacement for legacy storage.

After a rigorous evaluation, Starcom selected Zadara to replace their legacy EMC VNX and NetApp FAS storage arrays. The Zadara enterprise storage-as-aservice (STaaS) solution was deployed to support their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence, e-commerce, hosting and managed services businesses. The Zadara solution supports their VMware- and Microsoft-based applications in data centers in Europe and North America.

Data protection was a critical requirement for the Starcom team. With Zadara’s advanced data protection features — including snapshots, clones, replication and data encryption — the Starcom team are comfortable that customers’ critical data are protected.

Multi-Zone High-Availability

Additionally, Starcom added Zadara’s Multi-Zone High-Availability feature between their data centers, which provides metropolitan failover should one of their data centers suffer a catastrophic failure. In the event of one of their data centers goes offline, the architecture supports a failover to a secondary location ensuring that customers’ applications continue to run seamlessly.

We recognized significant savings by moving from a CapEx charge to an OpEx consumption approach that complements our business model.
Steve Donaghue
Director of Hosting Services | K3 Starcom
The results.
VMware IOPS increase 33%.

Performance was another key requirement during the evaluation cycle. To ensure the highest levels of performance, Starcom is leveraging Zadara’s endpoint iSER connectivity option between the Zadara storage and the compute servers.

“We chose Zadara because they provided the enterprise-class performance and data protection features necessary to support our critical applications. By implementing the Zadara iSER option, we are seeing 33% more IOPS in VMware,” noted K3 Starcom Director of Hosting Services Steve Donaghue.

Meeting Operational and Financial Targets

Starcom is an example of a service provider that recognized the traditional model of purchasing and managing enterprise storage infrastructure was not meeting their requirements. By researching the market, they found an alternative to the 3- to 5-year purchase-manage-replace cycle of capital expense.

By leveraging the Zadara pay-as-you-go model, they addressed their scalability, reliability, performance and cost targets. Additionally, they leveraged Zadara to meet their desire to keep their storage on premises and behind their firewall.