Casio creates cost-effective virtualized storage infrastructure with Red Hat and IBM

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Red Hat Inc. and IBM today announced that Casio Computer Company Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, has realized significant results in IT efficiency, performance and cost savings with a solution comprising Red Hat Storage, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM System x servers.

By combining virtualized industry-standard servers with open software-defined storage, Casio now has a highly available and agile storage solution that can accommodate heavy data workloads by scaling to petabytes.

Casio Computer Co., Ltd. is one of the world's leading manufacturers of consumer electronics and business equipment solutions including calculators, mobile phones, cameras, musical instruments and watches. The company previously used monolithic proprietary storage hardware and software that became extremely expensive because the operation and maintenance had to be entrusted to the vendor.

Casio, with the help of premier IBM Business Partner Lightwell Ltd. Co., deployed Red Hat Storage into its existing infrastructure comprising Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM System x3650 servers to cut its high storage costs and to avoid inflexible vendor lock-in.

IBM System x servers with Red Hat solutions were used to provide the backbone for the virtualized environment to offer reliability and support for new digital capabilities focused on increasing sales and visibility of Casio's clock, digital cameras and tablets products.

Red Hat Storage acts as a data-store of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, the open datacenter virtualization solution built on industry-leading performance of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

Within two years, Casio slashed its storage costs in half by integrating the internal storage disks of multiple servers and using it as one large storage pool that is accessible through the virtualized server. The Red Hat Storage management console also provides a simplified and unified way to manage both the storage and virtualized server environments for optimized performance.