Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) this week said that BlueShore Financial, a boutique financial institution, is its first Primera storage customer.

HPE first announced the high-end, mission-critical storage platform at its annual Discover conference in June. CEO Antonio Neri touted its simplicity, speed, and reliability — it comes with a 100% availability guarantee — during his keynote at the event. “This is the first time someone is offering 100% availability,” Neri said.

Primera also uses HPE’s InfoSight technology to predict and prevent any disruptions in the networking, application, and server layers.

All of these benefits played into BlueShore’s decision to deploy Primera, said Ryan Burgess, manager of technology infrastructure for the financial firm. But so did another factor, Burgess added.

Primera allows his company to reduce its data center footprint and improve its environmental performance by reducing energy use as well as a “mammoth amount of garbage and waste,” he said. “Think of an array with a rack full of disks and shelves, and five years later it’s worthless. Being able to do in-place upgrades means that’s not going to happen.”

Plus, changing out storage arrays requires space, migration capabilities, and time, and it’s hard work. “It’s way easier, way less garbage, and way less waste,” Burgess said. “That is really important. From an IT standpoint we’re generally not very conscious of that. We see a lot of products and devices that come and go, and that’s not very sustainable. I was really glad to see HPE’s focus on the environment.”

BlueShore, based on Vancouver, Canada, provides a full range of banking, wealth management, insurance, and commercial lending services. It has just over 400 employees, about 60,000 clients, and about $5.9 billion in assets under administration.

It’s been a Hewlett Packard and HPE customer for a little over 10 years. Originally it used a combination of IBM and HP/HPE storage, but when HPE acquired 3PAR and that vendor’s storage portfolio, “we decided to make the transition from IBM to 3PAR,” Burgess said.

Since then, the company has upgraded to several generations of 3PAR storage systems. But as it came time to retire its end-of-life 3PARs, HPE stated talking about Primera and BlueShore liked what it heard.

“It had the traditional HPE support and commitment to partnering, but it also was a fundamental change to the way storage works and how the software is architected for the system,” Burgess said.

Much of this change comes from using InfoSight’s AI capabilities to improve operations. HPE claims this includes 93% less time spent on managing storage, compared to previous generation storage arrays. Primera also has the ability to accelerate application performance — HPE says it is 122% faster than Oracle's performance.

The operating system decouples data services so they can be deployed, upgraded, or restarted independently. HPE says customers can upgrade Primera software in just five minutes without any distribution.

“HPE clearly understands the importance of moving to a services-based approach,” Burgess said.

And it comes with application-aware data protection with HPE StoreOnce for faster restores and HPE Cloud Bank Storage, which lets customers extend their storage to Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure public cloud for less expensive, longer-term retention compared to storing data on premises.

BlueShore will use Primera to run applications including VMware, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Temenos, which is core to its banking and business intelligence systems.

The 100% availability of HPE Primera will also enable BlueShore to develop new products and services for its clients. It has the ability to run multiple simulations concurrently to test the impacts of making changes to any client-facing products.

“We need to be highly available at all costs,” Burgess said. “People say [quality assurance] doesn’t need the same availability because it’s not production. But we have a lot of people who do QA and development, and the importance of that work to them is as important as anything else. So with Primera, we’ll be able to give that same level of availability to those products.”