Brewery moves to private cloud with virtual storage solution

Brewing company Heineken Netherlands has turned to a private cloud environment in its data centre to help manage data growth, save on costs and space and to automate data management.

As part of the process, the company has installed a virtualised storage system from Compellent. The brewing company had already opted for VMware to drive its server virtualisation and was looking for a complementary storage company and examined several companies. Liem Nguyen, Compellent corporate comms director said "Heineken Netherlands evaluated options from HP, NetApp and IBM before choosing Compellent Fluid Data for its high performance and efficiency of automated sub-LUN tiered storage, cost-effective use of SSD, scalable hardware, enhanced storage reporting and intelligence, and seamless integration with VMware.

Compellent Fluid Data is being employed within the Heineken Netherlands HOPS supply chain system, where the use has led to considerable time savings claimed Compellent. "Previously, it would take more than 30 minutes to run reports on the HOPS supply chain management system, a business critical application used in their brewing, bottling and shipping operations. Using Compellent SSD they've been able to reduce that time to 10 to 15 minutes. Latency has been cut in half to about 20 ms," said Nguyen.

The use of Compellent has meant a change in the way that data is handled, saving costs and improving performance. "About 5 percent of Heineken Netherland's data sits on the fastest, most accessible tier of SSD, 72 percent reside on the middle FC tier and 23 percent of historical data sits on cost-effective, higher capacity SATA drives. Heineken Netherlands expects to able to expand capacity using nearly exclusively SATA disks in the future," said Nguyen. Heineken also expects to make savings in support costs and in lower bills although these are not quantifiable at the moment, he added.