Bet365 has made the decision to move storage and compute for its development and test operations to Simplivity hyper-converged infrastructure.

The choice has been made as the organisation seeks a more efficient storage environment to develop rather than its current Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) SAN.

Based in Staffordshire, Bet365 has 14 data centres across Europe and even further afield and has a £60 million IT budget each year with 650 technology staff.

In 2014 to 2015, the total amount of bets placed with the company was £34 billion.

Recently, the company announced that it will roll out 0.5PB of object storage through SwiftStack software on commodity servers as it seeks to replace NAS for some of its data classes. This was added to a mix of EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and NetApp SAN and NAS storage.

The company’s high performance SAN storage will stay untouched because of the need to support transactional databases, though its development and testing capacity will move away from the HDS SAN to Simplivity hyper converged infrastructure, confirmed James Nightingale, Principal Systems Architect.

He said that the company’s development and testing environment is made up of several web servers along with a lot of nearly identical content.

With the current server/SAN architecture, a number of problems often came up when the company needed to expand its hardware, for example when adding storage capacity.

Mr Nightingale added that they found a stack of network, storage, server and hypervisor meant there were so many components and updates to be considered that it became difficult, resulting in long work times for engineers.

Whereas, with Simplivity, he says it is ‘like Lego’ as they know the costs and can extend it into one blast without any issues.

Hyper converged products combine storage and compute in one box with virtualisation capability and have emerged in recent times as competition to discrete server and storage products.