HighVail Systems has had the opportunity to work with a myriad of large corporate clients to cater to their data and storage needs. The founding principal partners (Bradley & Glen) are IT industry veterans, each possessing over 20 years of IT experience. This translates into trusted expertise you can count on.
Over the years, HighVail has built a solid trusted network with vendors and clients alike, not to mention solidified skill sets. The company stays abreast of innovative technologies and employs best practices in a manner that benefits the client and their business requirements.
HighVail is a reputable player in the storage solutions space and has extensive expertise in providing sound IT advice and infrastructures based on data reliability, flexibility, scalability, and business continuity.
Some of their clients are highly respected companies like Tier One banks and financial institutions, data centres and manufacturers. Companies that experience data overload must manage their systems, to provide information when needed, as well as comply with organizational and government regulations, without any unplanned downtime.
The following Case Studies (Scotia Capital, I-COM, Toyota) illustrate HighVail’s aptitude and commitment to delivering the best storage solutions.
1. SCOTIA CAPITAL
Scotia Capital is comprised of the Scotiabank Group’s integrated global corporate and investment banking, as well as capital market functions. The data flow is extensive and never-ending. Therefore, timely access to accurate financial data is a 24 x 7 critical aspect of doing business.
Scotia Capital requires continuous access to networked financial data and applications to evaluate market trends and conduct trades for its multinational corporate, institutional and private clients.
The Issue:
Scotia Capital’s time to replicate data centers was between 20 minutes to several hours. If a system failure or service interruption occurred during a back-up, the company faced the issue of losing backup for that entire system.
The Solution:
HighVail Systems along with their partner Brocade Communications helped Scotia Capital increase its Storage Area Network (SAN) capacity to support financial applications which were constantly growing. The single-point SAN management platform was designed to manage multiple directors, switches, and fabrics in real time. This process also allowed for troubleshooting from a central management application.
The Result:
Scotia Capital has bolstered its data availability and backup process in one seamless application. Reports are generated quickly from one centralized location as opposed to gathering information from various sites and systems.
Click here to read the full story.
2. ICOM Information & Communications
ICOM is a provider of high quality consumer response lists, data, communications products and analytic services.
The Issue:
ICOM gathers lots of information from consumer surveys administered via a hard copy to responses received via email. ICOM keeps a record of every bit of information collected for seven years in a safe and confidential manner to comply with government requirements, especially with those pertaining to privacy laws.
The company has a “keep-forever” mandate to protect its collection of data through long-tem archiving. As a result, the amount of data had swelled to 35TB, and continued to grow nearly 2TB per year.
The Solution:
HighVail Systems along with their partner Hitachi data Systems resolved ICOM’s issues with an all-in-one content archive platform. This highly flexible and scalable archiving solution is built around the same management platform and tools ICOM uses for their primary storage. The new platform also provides permanent storage while effectively managing scanned survey images stored in offsite tape libraries. The software implemented guaranteed accessibility to data and validates archived documents to ensure they remain fixed in their original state.
The platform also facilitates quick and comprehensive searches to pinpoint specific data within an archived record.HighVail ensured that future upgrades to hardware, software, data formats and encryption would be able to be carried out without risking authenticity within the digital chain of custody.
The Result:
The end result is an efficient method for staff to retrieve information within seconds as opposed to manually sorting through millions of scanned images stored on magnetic tape. All of this is accomplished with very little additional training and overhead required and can therefore leverage the existing pool of resources.
2. TOYOTA
Toyota is a well-renowned Japanese automaker with an extensive dealership network across Canada. Toyota employs the continuous improvement philosophy known as KAIZEN in everything the organization does to ensure quality is top priority.
The issue:
Toyota ’s customer data was segregated across the organization. A customer survey conducted revealed that the company could improve its customer resolution process as well as follow-up with the customer, as well as 14 other hot spots that could be improved upon. It became evident that the information coming into the company from the dealership, call centre and corporate website were not centralized and therefore impacted customer service in a negative way. Many customers complained about the “ping-pong” service due to the fact that each department’s systems were not interacting with one another with updated customer information.
The Solution:
HighVail provided Toyota with a best-of-breed high availability platform for their two consumer focused websites (Toyota.ca and Lexus.ca). The solution was built on Sun Microsystems servers running the Solaris 10 operating system and the Veritas Storage Foundation HA from Symantec to run the three tier architecture that makes up the consumer focused side of its “Customer One” system. This system has earned Toyota Canada industry accolades as well as the Diamond Award for Excellence at the Canadian Information Productivity Awards.
The Result:
Toyota Canada now runs a much faster, more reliable and infinitely more scalable architecture, thus providing a more enjoyable web experience for their customers along with higher uptime and transparent failover times for both planned as well as unplanned system outages. In addition, the information that’s fed into the customer management system allows head office to be alerted with car issues once inputted at the dealer level. This information fuels future improvements to certain makes and models if a pattern arises. The centralized customer database can be accessed by many areas of the company that come into contact with the customer, and therefore accurate service records and notes are seen and shared by every department accessing the information. The end-result is intelligent, up-to-date, results-driven customer care.
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