The IT Consultancy Group, identified the management of a cluttered data centre with aging hardware and software, as the key issues facing the Ombudsman.
They recommended SimpliVity's OmniCube hyperconverged infrastructure solution to meet the company's IT infrastructure needs.
By deploying a pair of 2U, modular SimpliVity OmniCube CN-2200s in the primary data centre and a third at a co-located site for disaster recovery, the Ombudsman has been able to vastly increase performance for report generation and achieve a 295:1 improvement in data efficiency.
SimpliVity's OmniCube provides a globally federated, hyperconverged IT infrastructure platform that uniquely combines eight to twelve core data centre functions below a VMware hypervisor.
These include computation, storage, networking, backup, acceleration, replication and WAN optimisation to provide real-time data efficiency, performance acceleration and global unified management in a single solution.
In weighing up options and selecting SimpliVity's hardware and unique Data Virtualisation Platform, Matt Grech, IT manager at the Ombudsman said: "We just didn't have the human capital to manage VMware running on a complex SAN with traditional servers.
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"We were trying to figure out how to get the most resource efficient solution from a CapEx and OpEx perspective."
The CIO's legacy IT system was designed for the early stages of the company's operations.
Without any virtualisation, the infrastructure impaired the CIO's ability to expand and adapt to new business growth.
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The company's servers were dedicated to running various applications and the organisation performed weekly system backups and nightly incremental backups.
While the Ombudsman had only small amounts of data, this operation was manageable, however it became more challenging as the company grew.
While this was viable for Ombudsman's early growth phase, a new strategy was needed that also improved data availability and enabled improved off-site data protection and disaster recovery.
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Grech said that moving the Ombudsman's IT infrastructure to a virtualised environment has resulted in multiple benefits for the company.
"The migration from physical servers to VMware on SimpliVity OmniCube has significantly improved our customer user experience," he said.
"From a data recovery perspective, we recently experienced a corruption in one of the main accounting applications, and the staff knew from experience that this would entail a lengthy recovery process across many hours.
"In contrast, now that we're using SimpliVity, I was able to restore the full virtual machine of the accounting application directly from vCenter in a matter of minutes using a backup taken only 15 minutes prior to the corruption.
"The company is impressed by this new business agility we have at our fingertips."
Simplivity vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan, Scott Morris, said the company was delighted to be working with The IT Consultancy Group and the Credit and Investment Ombudsman to deploy a datacentre solution that aligned to the flexibility and scalability that their virtual environment required.
Simplivity now has 17 parnters in A/NZ with 10 in pipeline, according to Morris.
"Not only is SimpliVity's hyperconverged infrastructure much more efficient than their legacy infrastructure, it is also delivering the IT team the flexibility to easily manage their entire datacentre infrastructure from within VMware vCenter."