Grant Thornton Belgium chooses HPE Nimble Storage

When replacing their HPE storage infrastructure, Grant Thornton faced the choice between HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage. Using RVT tools, AXI accurately assessed their future storage needs based on their current situation. Nimble's Adaptive Flash Storage platform provided the best solution in terms of performance and capacity. The solution is also easily expandable.

Grant Thornton in Belgium is a member of Grant Thornton International Ltd, one of the world's largest networks of independent accounting and consulting firms with 53,000 professionals in more than 130 countries. In Belgium, the full-service business advisory firm has six offices: Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Turnhout, Tournai, and Jumet. 160 specialists can assist all types of clients in achieving their growth.

When replacing their HPE storage infrastructure, Grant Thornton faced the choice between HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage. "Choosing isn't always easy," says Dirk Van den Broeck, auditor and partner at Grant Thornton Belgium. "Today's HPE storage looks completely different than it did a few years ago. In addition to 3PAR, the top storage system for medium-sized and large enterprises, there's now also the updated Nimble offering, which is aimed at the midmarket. For us, as a medium-sized organization in the Belgian market, it wasn't immediately clear which choice to make: 3PAR or Nimble?

Help with storage selection

Van den Broeck: "Using RVT tools, AXI first examined the current situation, which allowed us to accurately assess future storage needs. The comparison between the 3PAR and Nimble platforms provided clarity. With Nimble's Adaptive Flash Storage platform, we opted for the golden mean between performance and capacity. It's easily expandable and better suited to our budget." The Solution

Grant Thornton opted for the HPE Nimble Storage HF20 with 21TB of storage capacity and two HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 10 servers. The easily expandable HPE Nimble Storage HF20 is an Adaptive Flash Array, equipped with flash and conventional hard drives. It offers 21 x 1TB of storage capacity, 2.88TB of cache, and an average of 30,000 IOPS.
The two HPE ProLiant DL380 servers are deployed as VMware hosts. The existing backup server has been upgraded with a 10Gb dual-port Ethernet adapter and a 16Gb dual-port Fiber Channel HBA. A new 48-port network switch completes the new configuration.

The entire installation was performed by AXI ITS. All storage is covered by five years of Foundation Care support.

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