CASE STUDY
M
DC Business Management
Services (MDC BMS) is a shared
services company that provides
support in IT, finance, procurement,
facility management and HR for the larger
Mubadala Group. present-day prosperity of the United Arab
Emirates. The vision of the late Sheikh
Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founding
father of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi
until 2004, was a future for his people full
of opportunity and innovation.
The company chose to standardise its block
storage on Pure Storage – across production,
non-production, Disaster Recovery and
remote sites – to significantly reduce TCO,
focus IT resources on business-oriented
tasks, rather than storage management, and
improve performance of applications critical
to business performance and growth. A global legend emerges The Mubadala Investment Company
has played a starring role in fulfilling
that ambition. It is Abu Dhabi’s premier
strategic investment company, accelerating
the emirate’s economic growth through
laser-focused deployment of capital in 15
global sectors in 30 countries, with assets
totalling US$226 billion. Its broad portfolio
permeates sectors from aerospace and
healthcare, to real estate and ICT.
Abu Dhabi’s success story has become a
legend worldwide and a lynchpin of the MDC BMS provides expertise in several fields
– with a strong focus on ICT – to external
clients and the Mubadala Group itself.
The company’s Senior Vice President of
Infrastructure and Operations, Nalluri Subba
Rao, is an 11-year veteran of Mubadala.
He sees storage as the backbone of the
company’s offerings.
“Storage plays a vital role in any services
you provide,” said Rao. “Servers and
analytics rely on storage; the performance
of apps, the replication of data into your
Disaster Recovery centre, your security – all
rely on storage.”
MDC BMS runs 16 apps on 1,500 virtual
servers, all on the same storage architecture.
Each is mission-critical and performance-
intensive, so each requires reactive speed.
Previously, the team faced several major
STORAGE PLAYS
A VITAL ROLE IN
ANY SERVICES
YOU PROVIDE.
challenges in delivering optimal performance
to Mubadala and non-Mubadala clients.
“We had multiple disk-based storage
solutions,” he explained. “We managed
seven storage arrays from multiple vendors,
which ran to around nine and a half racks,
with a high TCO.”
Management of this legacy architecture had
become unwieldy for MDC BMS. Technical
personnel had to schedule extended
downtime periods for patching, fixing and
upgrading. The high rack space was also
becoming an issue and performance of the
overall ICT infrastructure was sub-optimal.
MDC BMS deploys FlashArray//X
to enhance performance, simplify
maintenance and reduce rack space
To overcome these constraints on business
efficiency and futureproof the infrastructure
– not only for MDC BMS but for the entire
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