The oldest mining company implemented the platform for data storage from Commvault

On November 10, 2020 the Commvault company announced the implemented solution and experience of its successful use in the oldest Swedish mining company.

Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB) actively uses analytics of data for ensuring profitability of business and labor safety on the iron mines with deep mines on Far North of Sweden. For maintenance of continuous work of mines business of LKAB should work round the clock 365 days in a year therefore the company the solution on management and data storage guaranteeing the 100 percent continuity of business operations was required. It was necessary to ensure round-the-clock operation of mines and to reduce idle times to zero, it is reliable to protect constantly increasing huge amounts of data of IoT and to be ready to unpredictable explosive growth of data. Also LKAB wanted to eliminate complete dependence from one vendor, to remove essential costs for periodic updating of licenses and scaling of specialized backup systems. Also it was necessary to provide the most quick access to data - at capacity utilization of remote cloud data centers there was an essential data deference.

Implementation of Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform, the universal platform for storage of different data types, and creation of the second cluster of storage for further scaling of capacity became the solution. The flexibility for storage of the growing amounts of data of IoT without installation of additional servers, expansion of network infrastructure and interruption of normal work is as a result provided. Due to elimination of the delays arising earlier at data exchange with remote cloud data centers round-the-clock operation of mines is ensured and users can always instantly obtain data necessary to them. Significant savings of costs for long-term storage are reached, and these costs will be predictable even at explosive growth of data. The flexibility and high efficiency of network backup and archiving is provided. Implementation was executed in one day.

Transition to Hedvig helped LKAB to cope with a continuous flow of data of IoT which generate every minute the seismic sensors installed in mountains and on their surface. These data are necessary for the analysis of a status of walls of tunnels of mines and determination on what sections of tunnels it is necessary to strengthen walls to prevent their destruction.

Earlier for storage of backup copies LKAB used the solution of other vendor at which the cost of storage of one terabyte of data significantly increased if storage life was more than 30 days. The solution Hedvig was significantly more available at the price for long-term archived data storage.

LKAB uses the solution Hedvig allowing to select flexibly capacity with an unplanned explosive growth of amounts of data that provides predictability of expenses. I can precisely tell the administration how many the X terabyte of data on Hedvig will cost storage. If we used services of storage in clouds, then I could set only the approximate price without guarantee that it will never appear much more, – Robert Pokhyanen, the consultant for storage systems of data center of LKAB speaks

Thanks to the reliable storage of large volumes of data implemented based on Hedvig in corporate IT infrastructure the staff of LKAB can get access to them at any time and the risk of unavailability of data due to the lack of communication with the Internet is completely eliminated. Implementation of Hedvig not only gave significant savings of expenses in comparison with use of cloud services, but improved efficiency due to ease of use and flexibility of storage.

The solution Commvault Hedvig was deployed in LKAB of all per day and already by the end of day was ready to data storage without interruption of a normal company performance.