Oulun Datacenter Oy

A Gold partner in the NetApp Service Provider Partner program, Oulun DataCenter was originally founded in 1992, and the current name has been used since 2013. The service provider employs 10 people, most of whom have both a technical and a sales-oriented role.

As the town of Oulu is based high up north in Finland, Oulun DataCenter is able to provide very energy-efficient datacenter services with only minimal cooling requirements.

The company offers customers a full range of services, giving them full control of the services they would like to consume, from data hosting to technical consultancy and training to full professional outsourcing. As a trusted advisor with local reach and support, Oulun DataCenter enables customers to operate globally.

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Oulun DataCenter was looking to simplify operations and use the same platforms for all its operations and needs. The old equipment was up for renewal and a new platform supporting both NAS and Tier 1 SAN workloads was required. The company consistently welcomes new customers, each with very different needs, and hence there was a need for a future-ready scale-up, scale-out platform supporting multiple protocols for connectivity flexibility.

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Oulun DataCenter turned to NetApp to implement a highperformance, all-flash NetApp A300 Series. In addition, the existing storage in the NetApp FAS8020 and FAS2554 systems was expanded. The company is an advocate of the “NetApp Data Fabric” vision, which enables customers to place their data anywhere, i.e. on-premises, at the service provider’s premises or in the public cloud.

Jesse Pietilä, Solution Architect, confirms: “NetApp delivered as promised and made it easier for us to plan ahead for future storage investments. We now have everything under the same umbrella.

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With the new, future-proof and scalable set-up, Oulun DataCenter benefits from a unified platform offering the same tools, while offering complete multi-tenancy support, data isolation, and security.

The NetApp A300 Series offers consistent low-latency performance for customers requiring fast throughput, while the NetApp FAS storage offers cost-efficient, scalable storage. This way, different customer requirements can be accommodated. In the highavailability environment, Oulun DataCenter benefits from an always-on system and has thus achieved true Non-Disruptive Operations – downtime, including forklift upgrades and migration, have become a thing of the past.

The company’s customer landscape is very different – some customers want to be able to manage their storage environment themselves, others prefer to outsource their data management processes to Oulun DataCenter – but the datacenter can accommodate any customer requirement.

Through the NetApp Data Fabric methodology, data can be placed anywhere, in the private cloud or the public cloud, depending on requirements. Customers have full control and visibility over the placement of their data.

NetApp OnCommand Unified Manager is actively used, as is NetApp Active IQ (previously AutoSupport) for visibility and predictability. This enables Oulun DataCenter to know when disks have to be replaced or when performance bottlenecks may occur. The datacenter also uses NetApp SnapMirror and NetApp SnapVault technologies actively, combined with Commvault and Veeam software solutions, and customers are using the NetApp storage as a backup destination.

NetApp data efficiency
technologies, including compression, compaction and deduplication, have proven very successful. Jesse confirms: “We mostly host virtual machines holding very similar data. NetApp efficiency technologies really can do magic, saving a lot of disk space. Currently we are looking at a deduplication ratio of 20:1, depending on volume.”

THE FUTURE VISION
With the NetApp Data Fabric fully operational, Oulun DataCenter is ready to tap into new markets and scale with customers’ data requirements. The service provider is prepared for the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR).

For the future, the service provider is looking to further optimize its environment, expanding capacity but turning more towards flash across clusters, while benefitting from centralized management. Oulun DataCenter is looking to combine all clusters for them to be managed through a single pane of glass, allowing for moving customer volumes across aggregates. In addition, the company is planning to make full use of its NetApp SnapCenter deployment.

Jesse concludes: “NetApp solutions certainly work for us as a service provider and it gives us the flexibility to address different customer needs.”

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• Unified platform
• Different tiers for different customer needs
• Non-disruptive operations
• Future-ready and scalable environment
• Multi-protocol, multi-tenant
• Significant storage savings through efficiency features

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