Ortigas & Co investing in modern technology with Nimble Storage

MANILA, Philippines - Ortigas & Co., one of the oldest property developers in the country, is investing in new technology to stay competitive in the local real estate industry.

The property firm said it has deployed technology from global flash storage solutions company Nimble Storage to boost its disaster recovery, backup and replication processes.

“We decided to adopt Nimble because of its simplicity.  It is easy to use and it has excellent compression technology.  It is also much cheaper than other storage solutions because you don’t have to buy additional licenses for different functionality. Replication and backup are already bundled in the machines, so they come for free,” said Ortigas & Co. network administrator Reggie Acbang.

Ortigas & Co. said its aging Storage Area Network has failed to scale up to meet user demand as backups and restoration were taking far too long, further impacting business.

Keeping data safe has also become a concern for the company as its traditional Storage Area Network made replication “prohibitively expensive and difficult to conduct.”

Approximately 150 staff rely on daily access to applications that help them to store and manage designs, keep an eye on budgets, manage suppliers, communicate with customers and control projects, Ortigas & Co. noted.

“Nimble’s replication capability is extremely efficient and sends only compressed changed data over IP. This makes it an ideal fit for companies within the Philippines where network bandwidth across the islands is expensive,” Acbang said.

In the event of a disaster, Acbang said getting systems fully up and running again would now require only 20 minutes as compared to at least half a day to restore just one database to one server in the past.

He added that backups, which used to take eight hours, are now completed within five minutes.

“We’re still in the process of moving data off the Storage Area Network onto the Nimble but we hope to finish next month.  It’s already clear we will have a lot more free space. Right now, we’re only using around 10 percent of our capacity and it’s clear when we finish we will have a lot more free space,” Acbang said.

Ortigas & Co has been a major player in the country’s real estate sector for more than 80 years.

Its portfolio represents some of the country’s best residential, business and commercial developments including the landmark Greenhills Shopping Centre, financial district Ortigas Center, value shopping destination Tiendesitas, and residential condominium community Circulo Verde.

The property company is building a master-planned, mixed-use development in Pasig City called Capitol Commons.