Andy Nallappan, Vice President, Chief Information Officer, Global Technology and Solutions Organization at Broadcom, recently sat down with us to discuss the company’s decision to embrace Dell Isilon, part of our industry-leading PowerScale family of scale-out network-attached storage systems, as an essential element of its data center consolidation strategy.
Broadcom, a global semiconductor and infrastructure software leader, was looking for an unstructured data storage solution that would support its consolidation efforts, enable it to better leverage resources, reduce operational costs and accommodate additional workloads, all while improving performance. Given Broadcom’s impressive growth strategy to grow both organically and inorganically through acquisitions, the solution also needed to be easy to scale.
Scalability and performance
Building on years of experience using Dell Isilon Gen 5 technology, Broadcom looked to Dell Technologies to understand how Isilon Gen 6 nodes could help it achieve its data center consolidation, cost reduction and performance goals.
“One of our main goals was to reduce the number of data centers and put the infrastructure in place that would allow us to leverage workloads more efficiently and accommodate additional workloads,” said Nallappan. “Isilon’s robust capabilities and simple scale-out architecture was a critical factor in our evaluation of the solution and how it could support our needs today and in the future.”
Broadcom selected a combination of all-flash Isilon F810s and Isilon H5600s to achieve a 90% reduction in rack space, lower operating expenses, gain faster performance, and lower downtime risks and break fixes. This powerful combination enables Broadcom to continue growing their business without increasing its data center footprint or operational staffing expense.
“Our strategy was not to just save money at the expense of the performance, our engineers or the experiences we deliver,” said Nallappan. “Using Isilon, we were able to reduce our spend while also improving the performance and user experience of our systems.”
The Isilon solutions – powered by the OneFS operating system, the software-defined architecture that powers the entire PowerScale family – are designed for demanding enterprise file workloads including EDA, data analytics and artificial intelligence. The Isilon F810s provide Broadcom with extreme performance, efficiency without compromise, easy integration with existing Isilon clusters and the ability to easily scale quickly as business demands change.
To support demanding, large-scale file workloads, Broadcom selected the versatile Isilon H5600 scale-out NAS platform. With a highly dense and efficient hybrid storage design, the H5600s provide massive capacity, throughput performance, storage utilization and data compression and deduplication options.
“With the support of the Dell team we were able to very easily migrate our data from our existing Gen 5 to new Gen 6 infrastructure,” said Nallappan.
Choose a partner not just a vendor
Like many of today’s large enterprises, Broadcom was managing multiple data centers across the globe and wanted to consolidate its data centers and take a more centralized approach that would allow it to better utilize its resources. When done right, data center consolidation can help organizations gain better consistency and control of their data center assets while realizing massive savings in cost and energy consumption and even improved performance of workloads.
“Broadcom and the Dell team have had a long-standing partnership based on trust and the delivery of feature enhancements that address our demanding EDA environment,” continued Nallappan. “Isilon has really aligned well and delivered on our goal to reduce costs while increasing performance, even as our storage demands continue to rise.”
While data center consolidation is often considered the most cost-effective way to manage IT assets and reduce operational costs, it is no simple task. To be successful, organizations need to ensure the choices they make do not come at the cost of performance. It is also important to choose a vendor that will partner closely with you on this journey, is committed to your success and can deliver innovation year after year to help ensure you organization continues to thrive in the Data Era.
New standard for unstructured data storage
For more information on Isilon and our complete PowerScale family of storage systems for unstructured data, visit our Unstructured Data page to learn how we can help you get more value from your unstructured data – at the edge, the core or the cloud.
If you missed Dell Technologies World Digital Experience 2020, you can watch the replays of sessions on our unstructured data solutions here:
- Unlock the Potential of Unstructured Data with Dell PowerScale
- Enterprise-Grade, High-Performance Object Storage: Dell ECS
- Cloud Storage for the Data Decade
- AI Architectures: Platform considerations from Proof-of-Concepts to Large Scale Deployments
- theCube conversation: How to Handle Your File, Object, and Streaming Data
- theCube conversation: EarthCam Visualizes the World with Billions of Images with Dell PowerScale
