Claranet boosts storage platform with 100% SSD arrays, delivered by HP

Claranet has completed a major investment in its storage capabilities, furnishing its storage services with Solid State arrays from HP and demonstrating its commitment to growing its hosting services and offering world class customer solutions.

Claranet has invested over £1 million into a new shared storage platform across three of its data centres, introducing a three-tiered model of storage. Each tier will have a guaranteed Quality of Service in terms of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). Both the standard and the premium tiers will be delivered from 100 per cent Solid State Drives from HP 3PAR arrays, providing a cutting edge platform available on a pay-as-you-grow per GB/Month model.

Commenting on the investment, Neil Thomas, Claranet’s Product Director, said: “This latest investment in our data centres will put our storage capabilities at the forefront of the industry, and grant our customers greater flexibility as to how they store and access their data, helping them to achieve low levels of latency for real-time applications. Claranet manages petabytes of customer data in its data centres, with a lot of this managed on shared storage platforms. These shared platforms give customers the ability to pay-as-you-go and buy storage as they need it, on an OpEx basis, as a fully managed service.

“Business applications have differing security, availability and performance requirements, and we have seen an increasing demand for high performance storage solutions to underpin modern IT applications. While we’ve offered high performance SSD solutions for many years, we see them becoming the norm, rather than the exception for large parts of the IT estate. The ability to guarantee levels of performance, while offering cost effective solutions for data with lower performance requirements, will become critical. Investment such as this ensures that we maintain our position as one of the leading MSPs in Europe and continue to offer our customers premium levels of service”.

Robert Wigger, Vice President Service Provider Business EMEA, HP, added: “Claranet’s investment in this technology is the largest investment in 100% SSD platforms we’ve seen in the UK service provider market and positions them as a leader amongst European Managed Services Providers. The explosion of data in recent years, some of it business-critical, some not, has left many businesses at odds as to what to do with it, and where to store it. By investing in SSD technology, coupled with the ability to guarantee performance on a shared platform, Claranet will be able to help its customers deal with the ‘data question’, offering higher levels of performance, improved reliability and lower latency.”