Toyota Financial Services places significant emphasis on best practices and the ¡®Toyota Way¡¯. While much of its value proposition depends on the reliability and quality of its service, the team was struggling with a storage system that could not live up to either ideal.
¡°Speed was one of the biggest factors,¡± says Darren Wiseman, IT Manager at Toyota Financial Services NZ. ¡°We had so many issues just getting anything on and off of the old EMC system. Our organization has a huge interest in business intelligence and data warehouse reporting, but we were experiencing bottlenecks that made many of the things we needed to do each day nearly impossible.¡±
Toyota Financial Services runs on Alfa, a business-critical system which is used to set-up finance for customers, manage fleets, and much more. ¡°When Alfa became sluggish because of our previous storage environment, there was a deep organizational impact,¡± Wiseman says. ¡°If you had to run a report at 3 pm in the afternoon, it would run so slowly that we¡¯d get complaints because our receivables system would break down.¡±
To maintain its position as a market leader, Toyota Financial Services needed a premier IT environment. After dealing with issues and latency problems for two years, Wiseman and Toyota Financial Services Senior Database Administrator Barry McAuslin put out the call for a new storage provider. ¡°We chose to go with É«¿Ø´«Ã½ because of how it was architected,¡± McAuslin says. ¡°Daily management was so much more straightforward and certainly a lot easier than what we were used to.¡±
Wiseman adds, ¡°Aside from what the technology itself can do, É«¿Ø´«Ã½ stood out by consistently being very keen to help. That level of support and ease-of-use is especially critical for a team of our size.¡±