Since 1995 Motortrak has been supplying online digital services, content and inventory management systems to the automotive industry, servicing over 3000 retailers in 70 countries. They have experts in design, branding and user experience and have won many awards for their innovation, SEO, Site design, multilingual content and brand marketing. With offices situated around the globe, Motortrak has helped many well-known brands develop and maintain their image whilst increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction.
Services to 3000+ retailers worldwide
High storage performance and capacity requirement
Performance & long-term scalability significantly increased
The Challenge
Motortrak contacted several suppliers within the IT industry stating that they were in need of updating their current file storage solution for a specific application. Given the nature of the design and marketing work that is carried out by Motortrak, their computing requirements are very processor and storage intensive, designed to keep all client information and data safe but easily accessible when needed. Any proposed solution needed to take into account the future growth that was expected of the business, and a number of potential scenarios were illustrated and proposed.
The Solution
As a NetApp Platinum Partner, Softcat and NetApp have a long-established partnership spanning more than 10 years and a dedicated team of NetApp presales consultants and implementation engineers who can support a NetApp solution throughout its entire lifecycle. This close relationship ensures availability of resource on a priority basis.
To fully understand the needs, a conference call was arranged with Motortrak, members of the Softcat specialist team and NetApp, in which Softcat was able to illustrate the potential of two solutions that were being offered, one of which involved a hybrid flash and the other a traditional disk solution. Following the call which clarified the scope of the requirement, Softcat then underwent an in-depth assessment of Motrortrak's data to further clarify the performance and capacity potential.
After deliberation and comparison with alternatives, Motortrak elected to implement the NetApp hybrid flash storage solution as this would deliver a more futureproof outcome by offering greater immediate performance with high long-term capacity, while optimising application performance across all available IT resources.
The Benefits
Motortrak needed a powerful and flexible storage solution that managed growth whilst also being able to maximise the long term value of the investment they were making. This particular storage technology is designed for performance-driven applications, delivering unmatched performance, while being highly scalable and manageable.
Chris Clayton, Infrastructure Manager at Motortrak, said about Softcat, "You understood our requirements quickly and put us in touch with the right people, plus got us great prices."
While it wasn't the least expensive solution being offered, the Softcat proposition was able to simplify the storage operations and cloud integration providing cost efficiencies throughout the business. Its unified architecture helps by supporting a broader set of SAN and NAS workloads with a far better and faster setup than any other entry-class hybrid array.