Able to Act Even in an Emergency

The Swiss Red Cross uses Pure Storage FlashArray™ to improve the performance of its critical ICT systems while staying within budget for operating expenses. Whenever a crisis demands its response, the organisation will have the ICT resources to provide the necessary help.

The Swiss Red Cross (SRC) is a humanitarian organisation belonging to the global Red Cross network. The 150-year-old SRC is involved in projects in Switzerland and more than 30 other countries. In addition to more than 400 staff in Bern and Wabern, it also employs a few hundred people in the 24 Cantonal Associations. The ICT Services department provides information and communication technologies (ICT) services not only for its own customers, such as the Red Cross Cantonal Associations, but also for partner organisations such as the Swiss Refugee Council. To ensure it can offer help wherever needed, the SRC requires a flexible and reliable ICT infrastructure.

To ensure the organisation remains highly responsive, the SRC supplies information and communication services from two redundant, highly available computer centers. In addition, it is increasingly making use of offerings from the cloud, primarily Office 365 and Azure technologies. The SRC private cloud is available to SRC partner organisations and selected NPOs under a service-provider model.

The ICT environment has grown with the organisation. The server environment now consists of almost 200 servers, nearly all of which are virtualised. Increasing volumes of data and a growing number of users resulted in ever-higher latency times on virtual machines. This was particularly critical for the operation of the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environments.

With a workload of 5,000 to 6,000 IOPS, the legacy disk-based SAN solution was no longer able to supply the required performance. In addition, it was extremely complicated to manage. Special adaptations were not only very complex, but could only be implemented by an external specialist.

“The slow VDI environment, waiting for programs to open, and the high maintenance effort increasingly restricted our flexibility,” explains Benno Stucki, Head of the ICT Services department at the SRC. “We had to look for a solution which guarantees quicker response times and thus more reliable compliance with our Service Level Agreements.”

The ICT team required a solution that would allow them to act quickly while

providing powerful data processing and high availability with low overall operating costs to achieve annual goals within budget. The server environment of the two computer centers needed to operate at high performance with lower latency and response times and without any bottlenecks, wait times, or failures. Consequently, only an all-flash solution could be considered here. The IT staff consulted with its IT partner, ITRIS Enterprise AG (now ITRIS One AG), to search for a storage solution.