About NISC
National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC) is an information technology company that develops and supports software and hardware solutions for their member-owners who are primarily utility cooperatives and broadband companies across the United States. NISC is an industry leader providing advanced, integrated IT solutions for consumer and subscriber billing, accounting, engineering and operations, as well as many other leading-edge IT solutions.
Business Challenge
NISC previously used Dell EMC’s PowerEdge VRTX onsite at 8 of its member sites to manage NISC billing and accounting applications. The systems were difficult to deploy at remote sites, expensive, and presented single points of failure. When Dell announced that the product was approaching end of life (EOL), NISC was eager to make a switch.
Solution
Upon reviewing several hyperconverged solutions, NISC was impressed with StorMagic’s small physical footprint, ease of deployment and in-house support offerings. After conducting a thorough proof of concept (POC) with the StorMagic engineering and support teams, the decision to move forward was clear.
During installation, StorMagic helped NISC implement simple, easy-to-manage VMware infrastructures at its 8 member sites. Not only did the solution provide high availability within a small physical footprint, it also allowed for a 50% reduction in required Oracle license costs – which translated into $22,610 in initial cost savings and $3,610 annually per site. Today, NISC’s SvSAN clusters are running virtual machine applications in hyperconverged configurations at all 8 sites, and are managed through StorMagic’s VMware vCenter plugin.
Why StorMagic:
- Cost-effective: NISC realized a 50% reduction in Oracle hardware and software licensing costs, resulting in $22,610 in initial cost savings and $3,610 annually, per site.
- Reduced hardware and footprint: StorMagic eliminates bulky physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity x86 server footprint. NISC reclaimed significant floor space by switching from VRTX to the SvSAN platform.
- Superior support: During the POC process, StorMagic ensured NISC that SvSAN was a good fit for their members as they had not implemented virtual SAN solutions previously.
Technical Configuration
| Server Configuration (Per Server) | |
| SvSAN License | Standard Edition |
| Servers | Dell PowerEdge R7515 servers |
| CPU | 1 x 32 core CPU per host |
| Memory | 512GB |
| Storage Capacity | 12TB |
| Disk Configuration | 16 x 960gb SSD RAID-10, 6 x 2.4 TB 10K RPM SAS RAID-6 |
| Networking | 10GbE direct connect Fibre, 4x 10 GbE SFP+, 4 x 1GbE BaseT |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit |
| Applications | VMware. Oracle database for billing, accounting, and engineering software. MS SQL for mapping software. Apache for web services. Java for billing, accounting, and engineering software |
| Guest VM Operating Systems | SuSE Linux 15 SP4 |
| Data Protection | Veeam for offsite backups and replication where required |
Simple
The customer found that SvSAN is a true ‘set and forget’ solution for any environment using centralized deployment and management – and deployed it in nine remote office locations.
Cost-Effective
SvSAN dramatically lowers costs by eliminating physical SANs, converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint. A complete two node cluster is available starting at $8,000. SvSAN came in at the right price and includes all of the features they needed for their remote sites.
Superior Support
The customer found StorMagic’s support team to be easier to work with and very responsive, and with no hoops to jump through, and less wait time.
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