To fuel a culture of business innovation, UCM Technics (UCM) worked with Core ICT to institute an all-flash IBM® Storage environment, enabling more predictable high performance and easier management.

Having supported entrepreneurs and SMEs in Belgium since 1928, UCM is well aware of the value of innovation. To expand its portfolio of services and provide more creative solutions for its clients, the organization embarked on a major modernization program. This included creating a number of new business workflows and digital apps, all of which demanded significantly more capacity and performance from the data storage systems supporting its IT infrastructure.

Xavier Lenoble, IT Manager at UCM, says, "In general, we needed to respond faster to new demands from internal business development teams so that we could be more agile in delivering new services to our clients. However, we were approaching the performance limits of our existing storage environment."

UCM runs a large in-house agile development function, which means that integration and regression testing run essentially 24 hours a day. This significantly affected the input/output operations per second (IOPS) of the available storage,particularly because tests typically run against snapshots of the complete production data rather than a smaller subset of data.

"We constantly refresh information from our production environment to our test and staging environments," says Lenoble. "This creates a constant high load on our storage infrastructure, and we also have significant month-end and end-of-quarter peaks related the calculation of salaries and social security contributions for our clients."

UCM wanted to upgrade its storage infrastructure to enable more predictable high performance and the ability to handle large peaks in demand.

5X
improvement in storage response time
2X
higher IOPs provide headroom for business innovation
75%
reduction in runtime for overnight database refreshes

"We were previously running at 85 to 95 percent of our maximum IOPs, which meant a risk of bottlenecks. We're now typically down to 25 or 30 percent, thanks to the additional performance and capacity of the new IBM FlashSystem solution. ”

Xavier LenobleIT ManagerUCMTranslating business needs into a technical solution

UCM consulted with Core ICT, its preferred IBM Business Partner, to review its options and determine the optimal transformation strategy. Core ICT conducted a total cost of ownership (TCO) exercise for the coming five years and proposed a solution. The solution was based on four nodes of IBM Spectrum® Virtualize (previously SAN Volume Controller)  in a stretched cluster with two IBM Storage FlashSystem® 7300 systems acting as the production environment. Each FlashSystem 7300 has 17 x 19.2TB IBM FlashCore® Modules, and backup storage is provided by two IBM Storage FlashSystem 5015 controllers.

To explore the validity and scalability of the proposed architecture, Core ICT arranged a technical workshop at the IBM Hursley Labs. The objective was to thoroughly examine whether the proposed architecture could effectively handle the unique workloads associated with UCM.

"As usual, we were able to present our business challenge to Core ICT and have them propose the appropriate technical solution," says Lenoble. "And then being able to work with the IBM FlashSystem experts really gave us confidence in our setup, that the solution would help our performance targets while maintaining the necessary balance between quality and costs.”

“Whenever we have a business challenge, Core ICT is there to help us find a creative technical solution. They understand our business and they know our existing infrastructure, so their advice is extremely valuable. ”

Xavier LenobleIT ManagerUCMSpeed and headroom for innovation

Following a smooth implementation process completed by Core ICT in two weeks, UCM saw an immediate improvement in storage performance, with maximum IOPS rising from 80,000 to 160,000.

"We were previously running at 85 to 95 percent of our maximum IOPS, which meant a risk of bottlenecks," says Lenoble. "We're now typically down to 25 or 30 percent, thanks to the additional performance and capacity of the new IBM FlashSystem solution."

Data compression is now performed in hardware on the FlashCore Modules, reducing the processing load and contributing to a five-times reduction in response time for interactive workloads.
 

Enabling more predictable performance

Besides enabling time savings on daily cloning of large production environments for non-regression testing, the new IBM FlashSystem solution helps accelerate the delivery of critical business intelligence to internal users and external clients. "Every day, we refresh databases with hundreds of gigabytes of data from the previous day's operations," says Lenoble. "We can now once again feel confident that that the updated versions will be ready at 8AM, so our business users can focus on innovating on behalf of our clients."

These refresh cycles typically took around four hours to run on the old infrastructure; today they take one hour, which means that UCM has time to rerun any jobs as required before the business opens again.

The IBM FlashSystem landscape also helps deliver the value of more predictable performance in other areas. Previously, at times when utilization on its old storage systems was high, executing the same software tests would produce significantly different results on each run. "It was extremely hard to validate performance," recalls Lenoble. "Today, we see the same access times and response times every time we run tests, so our software engineers are once again confident in our infrastructure."

Built on a solid partnership

Core ICT was able to simplify the existing architecture, thereby reducing physical cabling between UCM's two data centers and creating a single tier of virtualized storage for all systems to share.

"A single tier of storage is much easier for our small teams to administer, and the IBM solution in general requires very little management," says Lenoble. "We use the same IBM storage management software as before, and that continuity with the previous solution also helps minimize the administrative overhead."

As UCM plans how to evolve its IT infrastructure in the coming years—including the potential migration of some services to the cloud—it continues to turn to Core ICT as a trusted expert partner. "Whenever we have a business challenge, Core ICT is there to help us find a creative technical solution," says Lenoble. "They understand our business and they know our existing infrastructure, so their advice is extremely valuable."

Xavier Lenoble concludes, "The partnership we have with Core ICT is very important to UCM, as is our broader relationship with IBM. Our clients rely on us to provide stable, high-performance services, and our IBM storage infrastructure is a vital support, giving us a solid foundation on which to innovate."

About UCM Technics

UCM Technics asbl (UCM) (link resides outside of IBM) is a Belgian non-profit association that partners with more than 130,000 sole traders and over 30,000 SMEs to help create optimal working conditions. Founded in 1928, UCM employs more than 1,000 people today, and it advocates and lobbies for entrepreneurship and favorable economic conditions for the creation and development of enterprises.

About Core ICT

Core ICT (link resides outside of IBM), part of SYNTORY, is an IT consultancy and an IBM Business Partner offering tailor-made solutions that help its clients focus on their core business objectives without having to worry about the underlying technology. Its certified staff combine deep technical skills with a customer-oriented approach.