Pågen

Pågen, Sweden’s leading bakery and food exporter, needed to make sure that its businesscritical order management system was always online, seven days a week and all year around. To make sure of this, it upgraded its storage platform to a new NetApp® FAS8040 MetroCluster™ ONTAP® platform, gaining greater security for its operations, faster business performance, and easier management.

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Pågen

Pågen is Sweden’s leading bakery, with an annual turnover of SEK 2.7 billion. The company was founded in 1878 as a little bakery in Malmö in the southern province of Scandinavia. Today, it is a fifthgeneration business that employs 1,400 staff. It has two bakeries, one in Malmo and one in Gothenburg. Pågen’s various types of bread, pastries, and cookies are sold in just about every Swedish grocery store, and Pågen is also one of Sweden’s leading food exporters. Key export markets are France, Great Britain, and Belgium, but its renowned Gifflar cakes and biscuits are exported to 25 countries. Other baked goods are sold in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Germany. The Swedish market is the strongest for Pågen, although its presence in the rest of Scandinavia is also formidable, especially in Denmark, where it is known for its Kanelgiffel, a cinnamon bun. Its most famous international product is Krisprolls.

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As a bakery, Pågen is absolutely dependent on its order management system to distribute freshly baked bread to its Swedish stores, seven days a week and all year round. However, its steadily consistent growth was placing demands on its systems that were threatening the company’s ability to deliver.

Prior to 2010, Pågen had used an IBM storage platform. As demands increased, this platform was replaced with a NetApp platform consisting of a 7-Mode FAS3140 MetroCluster system and later an additional 7-Mode FAS3250 MetroCluster system. These performed well and supported the business for a number of years.
However, as the company grew, the FAS3140 system reached its performance limit. This was becoming critical because its product distribution requires the order management system to always be online. Performance issues were threatening this capability, and if the order management system slowed down, it could pose significant problems for the business.

To provide a sense of scale, 5,000 customer invoices are sent every day, and approximately 120,000 items are ordered every day. Every day this activity generates a large amount of data, which needs to be processed using the order management system’s database. To support business growth and business continuity, Pågen needed to find a way to add more performance to the storage platform.

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Keen to improve its storage performance with minimal disruption to the business, Pågen reached out to its IT partner, BareApp. Because of Pågen’s previous positive experience with NetApp storage and BareApp’s deep understanding of its customer’s storage, BareApp suggested that Pågen upgrade the existing NetApp environment with new controllers and disks, while reusing parts of the existing environment for the best total cost of ownership (TCO).

As a result, Pågen replaced its FAS3140 MetroCluster and FAS3250 MetroCluster systems with a new FAS8040 4-node MetroCluster system running NetApp ONTAP.

Ola Gustafson, infrastructure manager, Pågen, explains the rationale behind the move: “The MetroCluster function provides clustering with synchronous mirroring. In turn, this delivers continuous availability and zero data loss, eliminating the need for planned downtime, as well as greatly reducing the risk of unplanned downtime.”

In simple terms, the NetApp ONTAP MetroCluster system makes sure that all data from its order management system is written to two separate physical locations synchronously. This safeguards the order management information in the event of a disaster. It also provides a reliable foundation for making sure that, even in the event of a complete loss of one of its data centers, the core business can keep on operating.

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Smooth-running business
Since implementing the new FAS8040 MetroCluster system, the company has noticed that the system delivers on its promise of high performance and that the database read and write latency has decreased. Gustafson says, “It has helped users become much more efficient. For instance, online order registrations and report generation are much quicker. The invoicing of 5,000 customers is smoother, and administration times have also decreased significantly.”

More security
As well as enabling greater business efficiency and speed, the FAS8040 MetroCluster NetApp ONTAP platform has introduced greater resiliency of the storage infrastructure. Gustafson explains, “The advantage of the MetroCluster system is that the storage system can be distributed over two geographically separate data centers with complete synchronization. This means maintenance, updates, and testing can be done without downtime, and we always have a real-time backup in place.”

Less admin
Despite the advanced data protection and resiliency that the FAS8040 MetroCluster platform provides to Pågen’s order management system, it is a simple platform to operate and manage. “Its simplicity is a great advantage. New resources are mirrored automatically; no change in the configuration is required. This frees up time for the IT operations team, allowing them to focus on core business-enhancing tasks,” adds Gustafson.

Reliable, flexible foundation for the business
Pågen’s overarching requirements, to install a storage platform underpinning its critical order management system and provide a robust disaster recovery option, have been met. This has provided Gustafson with great reassurance and confidence that the right decision was made. He says, “It performs extremely well, and since we installed it, we haven’t had any unplanned disruptions in the ordering system. On one occasion, during a power cut in one of the data centers, it worked as designed, and data was effortlessly delivered from the redundant nodes at our other data center.”

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Industry
Food

The Challenge
Upgrade storage platform to support business-critical order management system that needs to be online always.

The Solution
Implemented a new platform, NetApp MetroCluster system based on NetApp 4-node FAS8040.

Benefits

• Reliable, robust platform that underpins business requirements
• Faster business operations
• Disaster recovery system that synchronously mirrors data and makes sure of zero RPO
• Easy to manage, less admin
• High performance

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