Proact, the largest European company focusing on storage and archiving, will deliver a new storage system for Oulun Tietotekniikka serving the City of Oulu. The capacity challenge caused by the increased amount of data, among others, was solved with an EMC Celerra NS960 storage system with nearly one hundred terabytes.

The system includes FAST functionality (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) that permits automatic transfer of data from a tier level to another according to current need. This provides a very efficient storage system with lower total costs than before.

“The continuously growing amount of data and the need for additional performance due to server virtualisation, among others, required replacing the customer’s old storage system. The customer needed more expandability and better performance,” says Sales Manager Kimmo Nurmivuori of Proact Finland.

Proact is the skeleton agreement supplier of the Oulun Tietotekniikka public utility for storage system products.

“We appreciate the local expertise of Proact in EMC and VMware technologies that have an important position in our data centre infrastructure,” adds System Manager Marko Niskala of Oulun Tietotekniikka infra services.

The most critical stage of the project was transferring the data from the old storage system to the new one.

“The transfer succeeded due to careful planning. As the city has operations around the clock, we had to place the interruptions to weekends,” Niskala adds.

Due to the solution, the storage performance increased considerably. For example, the time used for calculating the salaries of the approximately 9,600 city employees was halved.

The system can also be expanded up to 960 disks.