The SAN sweetener deal for Perfetti |
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By Jasmine Desai, Principal Correspondent
04 Jan 2010 | SearchDataCenter.in |
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Perfetti
Van Melle India Pvt Ltd (PVM) is certainly on a constant
search to find a perfect sweet for its customers. Since its inception
in 1994
with the "Center Fresh" brand, the company now has 13 well-known brands
to its
credit. But the journey has not been easy. Managing so many brands
calls for
strong IT infrastructure, and this was where the company found itself
lacking.
Earlier,
PVM used two HP MSA1000 storage boxes with basic
SAN capabilities. As Basant Chaturvedi, the head of IT for Perfetti,
says, "One
reason to discard MSA1000 was the slow
performance
of SAP, since we had plans
to run mission critical applications. The I/O cache rate was higher,
and MSA
was unable to support our requirement. A SAN solution seemed best."
Sometime
in late 2007, Perfetti began scouting for
a sophisticated storage solution. According to Chaturvedi, "We were
going by
performance and support. We evaluated solutions from EMC and NetApp.
IBM also approached
us, but we found their box lacking in terms of capabilities, compared
to HP at
that point in time."
Perfetti
settled on HP EVA4100, and the solution was
moved into its premises by January 2008. The company began with migration
of
data, followed by the individual servers. EVA4100 offers a total
usable capacity of 9 TB and
a total capacity of 13 TB. It seems sufficient considering that per
month data
growth is 15 to 20 GB. The SAN has both fiber, as well as SATA based
storage. When
it comes to SATA, a lot of space is used to store server files. The SAN
is
connected to seven physical servers (HP Integrity rx4640 and HP
ProLiant BL460c
servers on chassis based) and 41 virtual servers. Server
virtualization has
been executed by VMware. The total user base is 500, while there are
170 users
working on SAP.
The gains
The benefits are manifold. Chaturvedi says, "We
were dependent on the huge servers and local storage, which was on
direct attached
storage. If we want to ensure
business
continuity and disaster recovery, storage
is the single point of contact for us."
Besides these, the backup
cycle has reduced considerably.
With CIOs talking green, the SAN (along with server virtualization),
has reduced
Perfetti's power and cooling requirements by 2 million KW per
year.
Talking
about future plans, Chaturvedi says, "We plan
to implement business intelligence solutions and the SAN is already
exhausting
its capacity. So we will upgrade our SAN's capacity in 2010." Perfetti
plans to
put its existing storage on its business continuity site and purchase
new
storage for primary site.
Preferring
to stick to the solution's
affordability, Chaturvedi says, "SAN is much cheaper now. It is
affordable even
by small industries. The message is basically all about savings
on
power, cooling,
space and realization of performance."
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