30 March 2007

Hemscott is an international supplier of high quality business, financial data and online investor relations solutions. As a business solutions provider, Hemscott take information from various indexes, such as the London Stock Exchange, and provide this information to customers in various verticals.

As part of Hemscott's international operations, it is vital to have the large amounts of data stored using a secure and reliable solution, especially as clients need to be able to access a whole library of data, dating back 20 years. Being an international data group, which spans the Atlantic in the provision of high quality business and financial data, Hemscott needed a reliable IT system in place. The company decided that an updated Storage Area Network (SAN) was necessary to replace its outmoded storage Sun based system.

The challenge for the company was to increase the amount of disk space available to, vital to the core of its business, and implement a more flexible storage architecture using cost effective hardware.

With proven experience in IT infrastructure integration, server and storage consolidation, solutions development and deployment, B2Net was the ideal candidate for strategically advising the financial information provider about the implementation. After listening to the challenges and business criteria set by Knight and his team, B2Net decided to provide a centralised storage solution based around Network Appliance technology.

B2Net advised and implemented NetApp Snapshot technology, a feature of the WAFL (Write Anywhere Layout) storage virtualisation technology. A NetApp Snapshot is a "frozen", read-only view of WAFL volume that provides easy access to old versions of files and directory hierarchies.

NetApp Snapshot technology, provided by B2Net gives Hemscott more stability, recoverability and performance to the storage solution, ideal for the large amount of data needed to be stored by Hemscott. To incorporate and extend the advantages of Snapshot technology, B2Net also implemented SnapMirror to deliver the highest levels of reliability and functionality in the enterprise data section.

"We were very impressed with this technology, says Paul Knight, global head of network and computer operations at Hemscott. "It means that after a Snapshot has been taken, changes to the data objects are reflected in the current version of the objects. This means that in terms of ROI, Snapshot incurs no performance overheads."

B2Net's implementation has allowed Hemscott to regain a significant amount of time, stability, performance, scalability, file recovery and storage utilisation.

Key to this is data protection. "As a financial information company, delivering up to the minute data, time has been our biggest saving," says Knight. "We can move data around more efficiently and far more easily. We also have data protection, which we didn't have before. One of the main advantages for us is that we now have disaster recovery and a data distribution solution."

The implementation provided by B2Net means that Hemscott now have instantaneous, secure and user-managed restores. Hemscott can directly access Snapshot copies to recover from accidental deletions, corruptions, or modifications of their data. "The database performs better than before," says Knight. "We are able to produce statistics with NetApp's technology which is much faster." Hemscott have also saved money on the ongoing maintenance and the initial outlay on the hardware is more than compensated for in the low cost maintenance of the solution.

The company now has a valuable data protection solution, which has lifted several burdens from Knight: "Users request fewer recoveries of files from back-up tape. Consequently, it is a resource that we have quickly learnt to depend on."